Domain authority is a search engine ranking metric that determines the authority of a website in search engines. It is a search engine ranking statistic that forecasts how likely a website will appear on search engine results pages (SERPs).
The Domain Authority Score is derived by integrating numerous elements, including the connecting root domains and the total number of links, into a single value that can be summarized. Even though Google does not treat Domain Authority as a ranking factor, there is high concordance between Domain Authority and how authoritative your site appears to be to search engines.
Importance of Domain Authority
Moz’s Domain Authority (DA) indicator forecasts how well a website will rank on search engine result pages (SERPs). It is scored on a scale of 1 to 100, with higher scores suggesting a stronger possibility for ranking.
Suppose your website has a Domain Authority (DA) of 60 doesn’t mean much on its own. That number only becomes meaningful when you compare it to your competitors. On its own, DA isn’t a major driver of SEO success—but as a benchmarking tool, it can be pretty insightful.
It helps you gauge where you stand in the competitive landscape. For instance, it can highlight which websites you might realistically compete with—those with a slightly higher DA—and which ones are currently out of reach, like sites with a significantly higher score.
Domain Authority is built around the concept of link equity (also known as link juice). While DA doesn’t directly drive results, it’s a useful indicator of potential success. It reflects the overall strength of your link profile, and while that link equity might not be captured in a single perfect metric, it still plays a very real—and impactful—role in your site’s performance.
What’s the Difference Between Domain Authority and Domain Rating?
Your website-domain authority and domain rating both measure the same thing: your site’s overall SEO performance. The only difference is who realized the value of such comparisons: Moz for domain authority and Ahrefs for domain rating.
These metrics assess backlink profiles and overall domain quality; however, the companies use proprietary formulas to calculate them. In Moz’s inter-domain comparisons, the Domain Authority indicates how well a domain would rank on search result pages, whereas Ahrefs’ Domain Rating indicates the relative strength of your backlink profile.
The formulas may differ slightly, but Moz’s Domain Authority checker and Ahrefs’ Domain Rating tool will produce the same results when determining the health and visibility of your website.
How to Find Your Domain Authority
Checking your DA can also be done through the following:
- Moz Link Explorer: https://moz.com/link-explorer
- Ahrefs Domain Rating (a similar kind of metric)
- SEMrush Authority Score
- Ubersuggest Domain Score
Apart from that, all these tools throw light on factors like backlinks, anchor texts, and referring domains, which play a vital role in calculating Domain Authority.
How to increase Domain Authority: Step by step strategies
It may take you some time to attain a higher and more robust Domain Authority since it is a marathon race, not a sprint. These are in a thorough look at a few ways to help you get there:
Create high-quality, in-depth content
Quality content is the cornerstone of every SEO campaign. It promotes trust, draws backlinks, and increases visibility in search results.
Tips for creating linkable content
- Detailed guidelines, tutorials, and how-tos. Engaging and valuable content can assist users in learning new skills or solving problems.
- Original research or data. Keep content unique and creative and avoid self-promotion.
- Infographics and visual material.
- Expert round-ups and interviews.
- Specialized in complex problem solving.
This content strategy helps you keep your site’s main pages organized. At the same time, it creates opportunities to generate fresh content that attracts your target audience, earns valuable backlinks, and improves your keyword rankings. The more useful your content is, the more likely they will reference and link to it.
Identifying High-Value Content Opportunities
If you want your content to impact your audience and line, you must focus on actual high-value content opportunities. High-value opportunities refer to topics whose formats meet your business goals and fit your target audience, traffic generation, and conversion facilitation. Finding high-value content opportunities is critical for producing meaningful and relevant content that resonates with your target audience.
Here is how to recognize and prioritize them.
Start with Audience Research
Understanding the audience for whom you are creating content is the basis of any good content strategy. Know your target audience’s needs, preferences and pain areas. Gather data using techniques such as surveys, social media insights and analytics.
Look for trends in their behavior such as which questions are they asking, which pages are they spending the most time on, and what search terms are they using? Knowing all the pain points, goals, and interests of your audience allow you to generate content that aptly solves their needs.
Analyze Your Existing Content
Assess your existing content to identify gaps and opportunities for improvement. A content audit is an excellent move for discovering what works and what does not. This will allow you to evaluate your content portfolio—blog posts, landing pages, etc.—in terms of traffic engagement and conversions. Look for the old posts that can be refreshed and underperforming pages that need a fresh approach.
Implementing Keyword Research and SEO Best Practices
High-value content often sits on high-opportunity keywords. Seek out keywords that hit the sweet spot for search volume, getting adequate traffic while holding lower to moderate competition. More often than not, these types of keywords are referred to as low-hanging fruits that could readily induce organic traffic without giving competition to the big guys in your niche.
Next, take a careful look at your content and the keyword phrases that you’ve chosen, optimizing them as best you can with what a searcher would want. Think of it this way: are people searching for those words just to get information, to go and purchase something, or for one more reason entirely? That’s how you build your content: headers that state clearly, a good copy that captures interest and intent.
Earn high-quality backlinks
Backlinks—also known as referring domains or root domains—are links from outside websites that refer to yours. With backlinks from high-quality third-party sources being one of the most effective means of boosting a website’s overall domain authority (DA), building a robust backlink profile becomes vital. While backlinks are crucial to increasing DA, quality supersedes quantity.
So how do you get that high-quality backlink?
Valuable content must be created: Content should stand out. This includes guides, research, infographics, and expert opinions that others naturally would reference.
Promote the content: Broadcast your content across social media, email newsletters, and pertinent forums to maximize reach.
Reach out to credible sources: Be in touch with those renowned in the industry and propose that they link to your content if it adds value.
Guest blogging: Write posts for top blogs in your niche, linking back to relevant pages on your site.
Consider backlinks to be voted from other websites. A high-authority site linking to yours tells a lot to search engines when it comes to trusting your content.
But just good content isn’t going to cut it-get that content in front of people. Actively market your efforts across the marketing spectrum to maximize visibility and thereby the chances of your earning backlinks.
But make certain that you are vigilant as not all backlinks are good. Bad and low-quality backlinks, and spammy links can hurt your SEO efforts. Certain malpractices-such as spamming your competitors with toxic links, making deceitful mirror sites, and outright hacking of sites to tamper with rankings-constitute negative SEO.
The disavow tool is something Google provides, which lets you tell them which links to ignore from consideration when determining your link profile–in other words, to protect yourself.
Participate in online communities and forums.
Participating in online communities or forums often allows users to include a link to their website or blog in their signature. This can be a valuable backlinking tactic, as it exposes your site to a new audience and increases the chances of generating clicks.
Additionally, many forums permit users to share links within their posts when relevant to the discussion. If your content aligns with the interests of the community and provides real value, it’s likely to gain attention and even be shared by others. Over time, this strategy can help strengthen and diversify your backlink profile.
Leverage Social Media
Social media offers several effective ways to generate backlinks. One of the simplest is to include links to your website in your social media bios and profile sections. You can also share your content in comments and discussions, as well as promote your blog or site through posts that encourage shares and engagement from other content creators.
Both Google and Moz consider social signals—such as likes, shares, retweets, and other engagement metrics—when evaluating domain and page authority. It’s also wise to audit your current backlink profile to uncover any low-quality or potentially harmful links. These may need to be removed or, if removal isn’t feasible, disavowed.
Optimize internal linking
Internal links—which connect different pages within your website—play a crucial role in helping search engines understand your site’s structure and distribute link equity (the value passed from one page to another).
Best Practices for Internal Linking:
- Use clear, descriptive anchor text to give context to both users and search engines.
- Link to high-priority pages to boost their visibility and authority.
- Keep the linking natural—avoid overloading your content with too many internal links.
It also assists search engine crawlers in discovering and indexing your content more efficiently. One major benefit is how internal links tie related pages together, allowing Google to better assess their relevance and authority. As a result, your pages are more likely to be seen as credible, helping elevate your domain authority.
Enhance user experience and site structure
A well-organized, user-friendly website encourages visitors to stay longer and reduces bounce rates. On the other hand, slow-loading pages can drive users away—especially on mobile. To keep visitors engaged, ensure your site is optimized for speed and mobile responsiveness.
- Tips to Improve User Experience (UX) and Site Performance:
- Boost loading speeds using tools like Google PageSpeed Insights.
- Ensure mobile compatibility, since Google uses mobile-first indexing.
- Use intuitive navigation so visitors can easily find what they need.
- Install an SSL certificate (HTTPS) to secure your site and build trust.
Creating a user-friendly site structure not only improves the visitor experience but also strengthens your domain authority. A clear and organized layout helps search engine bots crawl and index your pages more effectively.
For larger businesses, investing in a public relations team can help secure backlinks from high-authority media outlets—an essential strategy for keeping pace with competitors that have strong domain authority.
Remove toxic links
Not all backlinks are beneficial. In fact, links from spammy or low-quality websites can harm your domain authority (DA) rather than help it. That’s why regularly auditing your backlink profile and disavowing harmful links is essential for maintaining a healthy SEO strategy.
How to Manage and Fix Toxic Backlinks:
- Use tools like Ahrefs or Google Search Console to monitor and analyze your backlink profile.
- Identify domains with high spam scores or suspicious activity.
- Create a disavow file and submit it via Google’s Disavow Tool, asking Google to ignore those links in its ranking algorithm.
If you notice a sudden spike in backlinks from suspicious domains with little to no authority, it’s a clear signal to take action. Conduct regular backlink audits, and if you find any questionable links, use the Disavow Tool to prevent them from affecting your DA.
Crawlability and Indexability Issues
If Google is unable to crawl your website effectively, it’s missing out on indexing your valuable content—ultimately hurting your visibility in search engine results. Likewise, Moz may detect these crawlability issues as well, which can negatively affect your domain authority score.
Importance of a clean, error-free website structure
Keeping the site structure clean and error-free is essential for the user and also for SEO. A well-maintained and organized structure makes it easy for visitors to navigate your site. Visitors do not have to spend much time searching for a page on your site. It also ensures that crawlers are able to traverse through your site successfully, increasing the chances that documents get indexed at all.
Simplified structure always results in clean URL paths and enables better internal linking, which ultimately influences search rankings positively and enhances your site’s visibility on search engines.
Using SEO Tools to Identify and Fix Crawlability Issues
Crawlability issues can quietly undermine your SEO efforts, even if you’ve implemented all the right elements. Such issues can even deny the site the full SEO value it deserves. Conduct a site audit on a regular basis using an SEO tool to keep you up-to-date with broken links, misconfigured redirects, or duplicate content.
Semrush remains my top recommendation for this, though Moz is also a strong alternative. These platforms highlight specific problems that could be impeding your SEO performance and provide actionable recommendations for fixing them. The best part? Most of these are fairly easy fixes, with a very good return on investment in terms of SEO benefits.
Tracking Domain Authority Over Time
Strong SEO practices require continuous assessment, and consistently monitoring your Domain Authority is a key part of measuring your site’s online credibility. Keeping an eye on DA trends over time provides valuable insight into how well your SEO strategies are working and helps you adjust your approach to achieve better results.
Using Domain Authority Monitors
Utilize specialized resources to track down reports of updates made to your Domain Authority (DA).
Moz Toolbar and Moz Authority Checker are two essential tools for tracking how your website’s DA changes over time. These kinds of trackers evaluate a number of criteria, such as the volume and quality of backlinks, as well as a clear picture of the effectiveness of your link building efforts.
As a result, monitoring your DA on a daily basis will help you improve your SEO tactics by pointing out any areas where you may be lacking and keeping you updated on how your website is positioned online.
Analyze and Optimize Your SEO
What to look for: All of the factors that contribute to your DA variations may differ, as will your SEO strategy.
It will focus on having the right and beneficial texts on your websites, backlinking high authority sites to your domain, and the technical aspects of SEO.
Check and revise your strategy on a regular basis based on DA tracker data to ensure that you are in sync with the ever-changing search engine algorithms.
By constantly monitoring and making proactive changes, you will improve your site’s ability to gain authority and reap long-term SEO benefits.
Mobile-friendly website.
Because most people now access the internet via phones and other devices, having a mobile-friendly website is becoming increasingly important.
A mobile-friendly site allows visitors to easily view it on their mobile devices and tablets, thereby improving the user experience and domain authority.
There are several options for making websites mobile-friendly. One option is to use the responsive design approach. With a responsive design, your site’s layout adjusts automatically to match the screen size of the device being used. Another option is to have a mobile version of your site displayed with different layouts and designs on smaller screens.
Also, ensure that your images are properly resized for mobile viewing. Finally, use a mobile-friendly navigation menu. WPtouch, as well as mobile themes and services, are examples of such plugins.
If you’re unsure whether your site is mobile-friendly, you can use a few handy tools to find out. One of these is Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool, which is free to use.
Increase page load speed.
The faster a page loads, the better the user experience, which leads to higher conversion rates, all of which contribute to the website domain’s authority. As a result, content marketing by your audience brings them closer to your consumer audience, which benefits Google.
There are numerous strategies for increasing page loading speed, including image optimization, fewer HTTP requests, and the use of content delivery networks. Additionally, web developers can cache static files on the user’s computer to avoid reloading each time, further reducing load times.
Core Web Vitals Optimization
Core Web Vitals — page speed — are among the most important ranking factors in 2025.
Websites that are not optimized have no chance of ranking well in Google searches or achieving high Domain Authority scores.
This mainly involves mobile optimization, as Google supports a mobile-first indexing procedure.
If your desktop site is flawless but your mobile site is subpar, it will harm your ranking opportunities.
Creating and maintaining a high-performance website is a massive task with hundreds of minor details that can go wrong.
The good news is that keeping track of these issues is relatively simple.
The only thing you’ll need is their free tool, branded as PageSpeed Insights.
It can track your website’s performance on both desktop and mobile devices and diagnose performance issues while on the go.
PageSpeed Insights does more than just provide performance scores; it also identifies specific issues that you can discuss and resolve with your development and SEO teams.
Periodic link audit.
This applies to both internal and external link audits: referring domain and backlink audit.
They identify broken links that can be removed, as well as an excessive number of links to malicious websites.
Meanwhile, the backlink audit identifies the weak points in your link-building efforts, allowing you to plan your strategies.
If there were dozens of links to one post but only a few to another, you may want to reconsider your link-building priorities in order to increase ranking impact for pages that truly require it.
Monitoring Progress
Ahrefs “authority checker”
Ahrefs’ own metric, Domain Rating (DR), is equivalent to the 0-100 rating provided by other tools, such as Moz’s Domain Authority. The DR indicates the strength of a site’s backlink profile in comparison to others in Ahrefs’ massive database of 177 million domains as of February 2020 (spam domains excluded).
SEMrush “Authority Score”
SEMrush’s Authority Score is a proprietary calculation that measures a site’s overall strength on a scale of 1 to 100. Unlike others who simply mimic Moz data, it calculates its score based on the quality and weight of backlinks, emphasizing the site’s organic visibility.
LinkGraph:
The LinkGraph Bulk Authority Checker can compare multiple domains at once. The tool assesses Domain Authority alongside other metrics such as Page Authority, number of external root domains, and subdomain spam scores, making it especially useful for competitor analysis.
Majestic Site Explorer
Majestic’s Site Explorer may place some emphasis on traffic flow, as it defines its various indicators primarily in terms of two metrics: Trust Flow (TF) and Citation Flow. The former attempts to assess a website’s credibility based on the trustworthiness of its referring URLs, whereas the latter focuses on the number of referring links to that site. The higher the trust flow, the more likely and truthful the assessment of the site on other forums.
Uber suggests Tool.
Neil Patel’s Ubersuggest is a simple tool that analyzes incoming links, domain authority, and other SEO metrics.
It can determine backlinks for a full domain or a specific URL or subdomain, making it useful for an SEO snapshot.
SE Ranking:
As a result, the SE Ranking Domain Trust system provides an overall view of the evaluated composite score in terms of the quality and quantity of referring domains and backlinks, allowing them to gain a more comprehensive understanding of their site’s backlink profile strength in relation to SEO authority.
SEO Review Tools:
Working with SEMrush, SEO Review Tools values Domain Authority, Page Authority, and linking statistics such as domain age and social media presence (limited to Facebook and Pinterest). It’s a good place to start when looking for all-in-one domain measurements for analysis, identifying linking domains, and spotting potential link-building opportunities.
Common Mistakes That Lower Website Domain Authority (DR)
Mistakes are frequently overlooked by websites; however, prompt correction can have a positive impact on a site’s domain authority.
Let us elaborate!
1. Focusing solely on the quantity of links
Many websites focus heavily on obtaining as many backlinks as they can. This is beneficial when the backlinks come from relevant and authoritative websites.
On the contrary, link acquisition from low-quality and irrelevant sites tends to lower link-acquiring sites’ DA scores and will eventually be detrimental over time.
It has always been about niche relevance and trustworthiness to improve your site’s DA.
2. Leaving Old Content in Blogs and That High-Performing Page for Updating
Did this happen to you: a top-performing page on your website is no longer receiving the same amount of traffic and leads as before?
Well, there are numerous reasons for this scenario. One of the most common reasons, of course, is content decay. Let us explain this in layman’s terms. Content decay is the consistent, gradual decline in organic traffic and rankings for a piece of content.
It most commonly occurs on sites that focus on creating new content while assuming that the old ones are already taken care of for ranking purposes.
As a result, search engines remove pages that do not update with age. Try to keep your content fresh, relevant, and optimized. This will help you win the DA score.
3. Ignoring Link Diversity.
Search engine algorithms are so intelligent that they can easily detect sites that are cited and linked to each other from the same type of sources or even link types. When a site follows this pattern (for example, acquiring backlinks solely through guest posting or directory submissions), search engines consider it unnatural.
On the contrary, there is now an extremely simple way to improve the credibility and trustworthiness of search engines in such cases. Link diversity simply indicates that the website is being referred to by search engines from across the internet.
4. Ignoring the Removal of Toxic Links
Some may argue that they do not link to such bad reputation sites, which will not affect their rankings. So, in order to bring this to your attention, we would like to present some significant facts.
Some competitors explicitly create toxic backlinks to their competitor’s site in order to lower its search rankings. Such links may also be generated if your link-builder uses black-hat SEO techniques without informing you.
To remedy this situation, conduct regular audits of your backlink profile. You can use tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush to identify links from spam, unrelated, or low-authority websites.
If you find them, you can disavow them by using Google’s Disavow tool to instruct the search engine not to consider these links when evaluating your websites.
