What Is Domain Authority and How Do You Actually Improve It?

What Is Domain Authority?

Domain Authority (DA) is a metric developed by Moz that predicts how well a website will rank in search engines. It scores from 0–100, with higher scores indicating greater authority. Ahrefs has a similar metric called Domain Rating (DR).

Important: DA is NOT a Google metric. Google doesn’t use DA or DR in its algorithm. These are third-party proxies for link authority — useful for benchmarking and competitor analysis, but not the objective itself.

What DA Actually Measures

DA is calculated based primarily on the quality and quantity of backlinks pointing to your domain. A site with many links from high-authority sites will have a high DA. A new site with no links will have a DA of 1.

How to Improve Domain Authority

1. Earn High-Quality Backlinks

The only reliable way to improve DA is to earn links from sites with higher authority than yours. Focus on digital PR, guest posting on authoritative publications and resource link building.

2. Fix Technical Issues That Waste Authority

Broken links, redirect chains and crawl errors waste the authority you already have. Audit and fix these regularly.

3. Improve Internal Linking

Internal links distribute authority across your site. A comprehensive internal linking strategy ensures that your most important pages receive the maximum share of your domain’s authority.

4. Remove Toxic Links

Low-quality or spammy links can damage your authority. Use Google’s Disavow Tool if you’ve identified a pattern of unnatural links pointing to your site.

5. Be Patient

DA improvements take months. Focus on earning great links consistently rather than chasing the metric itself.