Domain authority

A low-authority site struggles to rank for competitive keywords however well a page is written. Raising authority widens the set of keywords worth competing for. It also compounds: as authority grows, new pages tend to rank faster.

The score is only an estimate. Google has said it does not use domain authority as a ranking factor, so treat it as a thermometer, not the condition itself. It is a useful way to compare your site with the competitors you are trying to beat, and a poor goal on its own.

• Check your score and the sites already linking to you, and remove or disavow clearly spammy links.
• Chase quality over quantity. One link from a respected site in your industry beats a hundred from irrelevant ones.
• Compare against the actual competitors you are fighting for keywords, because the score is relative.
• Publish content more complete than what already ranks, such as original research with real data. That kind of page earns links without asking.
• Keep technical SEO clean, since a page a crawler cannot read earns nothing.

Domain authority, or DA, is a rating of a website's overall strength. Moz calculates it mainly from the links pointing to the site, taking into account how many linking sites there are and how trusted they are. A new site starts low. A well-linked publication scores high.

The scale is logarithmic, so moving from 20 to 30 is much easier than moving from 70 to 80. Other tools have their own versions, such as Ahrefs' Domain Rating and Semrush's Authority Score. They use different data, so scores cannot be compared across tools.

• Buying links to raise the number, which risks a penalty and does not bring buyers.
• Mistaking it for Domain reputation, which is an email inbox trust score, not a search measure.
• Reporting DA as a result when traffic and leads are the real results.