domain authority
Domain authority is a rough, third-party score of how much a website's overall reputation is likely to help it rank, built mostly from how many other trusted sites link to it.
Domain authority is a score, usually zero to a hundred, produced by SEO tool companies like Moz and Ahrefs, meant to estimate how strong a website’s overall reputation is compared to others. It is built mainly from inbound links: how many other sites link to you, and how reputable those linking sites are themselves.
A link from a small personal blog counts for little. A link from a well-known, well-linked organisation, olympic.ca or a national sports body, for example, counts for a lot, because it is harder to earn and it is itself a vote of confidence being passed along. Domain authority tries to compress all of that into one comparable number.
Why it matters to you
It is not a number Google reads. It is a diagnostic tool for you and me, useful for the same reason a credit score is useful even though no landlord invented it: it summarises a messy pile of signals into something you can compare over time and against competitors.
A site with genuinely strong domain authority tends to find it easier to rank new pages, because search engines already trust the domain going in. That matters most when you are publishing new content and want it to have a fighting chance quickly, rather than needing months to earn trust from a standing start.
How I use it
I check it early, as a snapshot of where a site actually stands before I claim anything about growth. A site with 175 legitimate sites already linking in, including nationally recognised organisations, is starting from a real foundation, even if the pages themselves are thin or unindexed. That changes the plan: the priority becomes building out the pages that foundation can lift, rather than chasing links from a cold start.
I do not chase the number itself. Buying links or padding it with low-quality directories can move the metric slightly while doing nothing, or actively harming, actual search performance. The only durable way to raise it is being worth linking to: coverage, partnerships, being the source other sites cite, which is a slower and more honest path than any shortcut.
What it looks like in practice
I pull the number as a baseline, note who the strongest existing links come from, and use that to decide where new content or outreach has the best chance of compounding. If your podcast guests already draw traffic and attention from sites that carry weight, that is the leverage worth building pages around, rather than something to work around.
Over time the score should track a real trend, not spike from a purchased link package. If it moves, it should move because the underlying reputation actually changed.
Questions I get about this
- Is domain authority a real Google ranking factor?
- No. It is a metric built by SEO tool companies, not by Google, and Google has said directly that it does not use it. It is a useful estimate for comparing sites, but it is a proxy, not something search engines read and score you on.
- Can domain authority go down?
- Yes. It moves with the state of the wider web, not just your own actions. If sites that used to link to you disappear or remove the link, or the tool changes how it calculates the score, your number can drop with no change on your end.
- How do I actually raise it?
- The only real lever is earning links from other legitimate sites, through being genuinely worth linking to: press coverage, being quoted as an expert, partnerships, guest appearances. There is no setting to switch on. It is a byproduct of being visible and credible, not a task you complete once.
Want this set up properly for your business?
This is the kind of thing I build every week. Grab a time and we will talk through what fits.