Domain Authority (DA)

Domain Authority (DA) is a third-party metric created by Moz, scored 1-100, estimating how likely a website is to rank in search results based largely on its backlink profile.

Updated

November 12, 2026

Category

SEO Glossary

Domain Authority (DA)

DA is a logarithmic scale, which means the jump from 20 to 30 is far easier than the jump from 70 to 80 — a site doesn't need to double its backlink strength to gain ten points at the low end, but needs a dramatic increase at the high end. Like all third-party authority metrics, DA is not used by Google's actual ranking algorithm; it's Moz's independent prediction, built and periodically recalibrated from Moz's own link index, which is smaller than Google's full index. DA is most reliably used to compare sites relative to each other at a point in time (is this potential link partner stronger than that one) rather than as an absolute target or a metric to report as a growth KPI on its own.

Example

A link-building team uses DA to filter a prospect list of 200 sites down to the 50 with DA 40+ worth pursuing for outreach.

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