Domain Authority: What It Is, What Counts as Good, and How to Improve It

Fastlancer Team · Updated: Aug 18, 2026

Domain Authority (DA) is a score from 0 to 100, created by Moz, that predicts how likely a whole domain is to rank in search results. It is a machine-learning prediction built mainly from Moz's link index — not a measurement of anything Google publishes, and not a Google ranking factor. Its value is comparative: a DA of 45 means something next to a competitor's 62, and almost nothing on its own.

Domain Authority in 30 seconds

What it isMoz's prediction of how likely a domain is to rank

Scale0 to 100, logarithmic — the top end is far harder to climb

Google factor?No. Google does not use it and never has

Where to check itMoz Link Explorer or the MozBar extension — free account is enough

What good meansOnly relative to the domains ranking for your keywords

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What is Domain Authority?

Domain Authority is Moz's answer to a question the SEO industry never got a public answer to from Google: how strong is this website, on one number, so I can compare it with another one?

Moz built a machine-learning model that looks at a domain's link profile and predicts how likely that domain is to show up in search results, then expressed the output on a 0-to-100 scale. Every domain on the web gets a score. That is the whole idea — and the reason it spread: a link seller, an editor and a client could all look at the same free number and mean the same thing by it.

Moz reports two versions of the prediction:

Domain Authority (DA) — the prediction for an entire domain.
Page Authority (PA) — the same prediction for a single URL.

Alongside them sits Spam Score, which estimates the share of comparable sites that Google has penalised or removed — a sanity check when you are judging whether a link is worth having. Two older Moz scores, MozRank and MozTrust, were retired in 2018 when Moz rebuilt its link index; if a third-party tool still shows you a MozRank figure, it is deriving one itself. Our Moz Pro review walks through which score still exists and where each one lives in the product.

What does Domain Authority mean in SEO?

It means exactly one thing: Moz's model considers this domain more or less likely to rank than that one. Everything else people load onto the number is interpretation.

Three consequences follow, and they are the part most explainers skip:

It is a prediction, not a grade. The model is trained to guess Google's output from the outside. When it is wrong — and it is regularly wrong for individual pages — nothing about your site has changed.
It is relative and rescaled. When Moz refreshes its index, scores shift across the whole web. A drop from 34 to 31 very often means the scale moved underneath you, not that you lost anything.
It is not a Google ranking factor. Google does not use DA. This is worth saying out loud, because a large amount of link-selling and guest-post pitching is built on the implication that it does.

So where is it genuinely useful? Comparing candidates. Deciding whether a guest-post site is a step up or a step down from the sites already linking to you. Sizing up how far you are from the domains occupying page one. Tracking your own trend across months. That is a real job, and DA does it well.

What is a good Domain Authority score?

There is no absolute good score, and anyone who names one is selling something. DA is relative by construction: it predicts your chances compared with other domains, so a number without a comparison set is meaningless.

The version of the question that has an answer is this one: how does your score compare with the domains already ranking for the keywords you want? Search your main keyword, run the page-one results through the MozBar, and you have your target range. In a quiet niche that range might sit low; in a commercially contested one it will be high. Both are normal.

Two more things worth internalising before you set yourself a target:

The scale is logarithmic. Getting from 20 to 30 is a different order of effort than getting from 70 to 80. Early progress feels fast and then flattens — that is the scale doing what it was designed to do, not your work failing.
A new domain starts low and that is not a problem. A young site with few referring domains scores low because it has few referring domains. The fix is links over time, not a tactic.

How is Domain Authority calculated?

Moz trains a machine-learning model to predict search rankings, and feeds it Moz's own crawl of the web's link graph. The inputs that carry the most weight are link-based: how many distinct domains link to a site, and how strong those linking domains are themselves. The model's output is then normalised onto the 0-to-100 scale.

Two properties of that method matter more in daily use than the formula does:

Moz does not publish the full calculation, and it changes. The model gets retrained and re-normalised. That is a feature — a prediction model that never updated would drift away from Google — but it means your score can move without you doing anything.
Distinct referring domains beat raw link count. Fifty links from one site are not fifty signals. This single fact explains most of what actually works in the next section.

One practical implication: never read a DA change in isolation. Check a couple of competitor domains at the same time. If everyone moved, the index moved.

How to check your Domain Authority (free)

Domain Authority is Moz's metric, so Moz's own tools are where it is reported natively. Two free routes:

Link Explorer — enter any domain and you get its DA, its referring domains, Spam Score and the Page Authority of individual URLs. This is the tool people actually open when someone asks for a DA.
MozBar — a browser extension that overlays DA and PA on any page you visit and on every result in a search results page. For sizing up a SERP or a link prospect in three seconds, nothing beats it.

Both are covered by a free Moz Community account, which gives limited access to Link Explorer, Keyword Explorer and the MozBar. Limited means capped queries per month, not a crippled version — if you need to look up a domain a few times a month, the free account is the whole answer and you can stop reading here.

Check a domain with Moz

What you should be sceptical of are the free DA checkers scattered across the web. Most of them query the Moz API and re-display the number, which is fine; some display a score they calculated themselves and label it Domain Authority, which is not. If the number matters — a client report, a link decision — read it from the source.

How to increase your Domain Authority

You cannot edit the score. You can only change the inputs, and the inputs are overwhelmingly links. That reframes the task usefully: stop trying to raise DA, and start trying to earn the links that would raise it anyway.

What moves the number, in rough order of effect:

Links from domains that don't already link to you. A new referring domain adds a signal the model has not seen; the eleventh link from a site that already links to you adds close to nothing. Count domains, not links.
Something genuinely worth citing. Original data from your own work, a free calculator, a guide that answers a question properly. Link building without a reason to link is a numbers game you will lose to people with more time.
Targeted outreach rather than volume. Pull the referring domains of two or three competitors out of Link Explorer. Those sites have already demonstrated they link to material like yours — that is a warmer list than any scraped one.
Cleaning up what drags. Spam Score exists so you can spot the low-quality end of your own profile. Bought links and bulk exchanges are precisely what it is tuned to notice.
Fixing technical leakage. Broken pages, redirect chains and duplicate content waste authority you already paid for. A crawler sorts them by severity so you fix the expensive ones first.

And the expectation-setting: this is slow. Because the scale is logarithmic and rescaled on refresh, a month is not a measurement period. Track your score against two competitors, quarterly, on the same day.

Domain Authority vs Domain Rating vs Authority Score vs Trust Flow

Every major SEO tool has its own authority metric, and they are not interchangeable. A DA of 40 and a DR of 40 do not describe the same thing, are not calculated the same way, and cannot be compared across tools.

Metric	Tool	Scale	What it expresses
Domain Authority (DA)	Moz	0–100	Predicted likelihood that a whole domain ranks
Page Authority (PA)	Moz	0–100	The same prediction for a single URL
Domain Rating (DR)	Ahrefs	0–100	Strength of a domain's backlink profile
Authority Score (AS)	Semrush	0–100	Overall domain quality in Semrush's model
Trust Flow / Citation Flow	Majestic	0–100	Link quality and link volume, scored separately

Two rules for living with this. First, pick one and stay with it — the trend is the information, and switching tools resets your history. Second, whichever one your counterpart quotes is the one that matters in that conversation: if a guest-post editor asks for your DA, they mean Moz's number, and only Moz reports it natively. That practical detail is why DA survives despite not being a Google factor at all.

Majestic's pair is the interesting outlier: splitting quality (Trust Flow) from quantity (Citation Flow) makes a profile of many weak links visibly different from a profile of few strong ones — a distinction a single blended score hides. We cover all of these side by side in our comparison of the best SEO tools.

Do you need Moz Pro, or is the free account enough?

Be honest about which job you have.

If you look up a Domain Authority a few times a month — vetting a link prospect, checking a competitor, answering a client question — the free Moz Community account covers it. Limited Link Explorer, limited Keyword Explorer, the full MozBar extension. There is no reason to pay.

If DA is part of ongoing work — tracked rankings, weekly site crawls, repeated keyword research, client reporting — the free limits become the bottleneck fast, and Moz Pro is the upgrade. It starts at $49 per month with the Starter plan ($39 billed annually), which covers a single website — for one freelancer or a small business tracking their own site, that is usually the right tier. Standard is $99 per month ($79 annually), Medium $179 ($143) and Large $299 ($239); Moz discounts annual plans by around 20%. Prices as of August 2026 — Moz's pricing page is the authority.

Worth weighing before you commit: Moz is narrower than Semrush on keyword and competitor data and its backlink index is smaller than Ahrefs'. What nothing else gives you is Domain Authority at the source. Our full Moz Pro review goes through the plans, the query limits and where the suite runs out of road.

See Moz plans and the free account

The short version

Domain Authority is Moz's 0-to-100 prediction of how likely a domain is to rank. It is not a Google ranking factor.
A good score exists only relative to the domains ranking for your keywords — check them, and you have your target.
The scale is logarithmic: 20 to 30 is easy, 70 to 80 is not.
Check it in Moz Link Explorer or the MozBar; a free Moz account is enough for occasional lookups.
To raise it, earn links from new referring domains and publish things worth citing. Nothing else reliably works.
DA, Ahrefs DR, Semrush AS and Majestic TF are different metrics. Pick one, keep the history, and use whichever one the person across the table quotes.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What is domain authority?

Domain Authority (DA) is a score from 0 to 100, invented by Moz, that predicts how likely a whole domain is to rank in search results. It is a machine-learning prediction, not a measurement of anything Google does — and Google does not use it. You can look it up in Moz's Link Explorer or with the free MozBar browser extension; see our Moz Pro review for how the tools fit together.

What does domain authority mean in SEO?

In practice it means one thing: Moz's model considers this domain more or less likely to rank than that one. It became shorthand across the industry because everyone could see the same number for any site, for free. It does not mean Google rates your site at that level, it does not mean a page will rank, and it is not a grade you can appeal.

What is a good domain authority score?

There is no absolute answer, because DA is relative — it only means something next to another domain. The useful version of the question is: how does your score compare with the sites that already rank for the keywords you want? Look up the page-one results for your main keyword and you have your target range. A score that would be excellent in a quiet niche can be unremarkable in a competitive one.

What is my domain authority, and how do I find it?

Enter your domain into Moz's Link Explorer. A free Moz Community account gives you limited access to Link Explorer, Keyword Explorer and the MozBar browser extension — enough to check a domain, look at who links to a competitor and sanity-check a few keywords. If you need the number a handful of times a month, that free account is the entire answer.

How is domain authority calculated?

Moz trains a machine-learning model to predict search results and feeds it its own link index — chiefly how many distinct domains link to a site and how those linking sites themselves score. The full formula is not published, and it changes: Moz retrains and re-normalises the model, which is why scores across the whole web can shift after an index refresh. The scale is also logarithmic, so climbing from 20 to 30 takes far less work than climbing from 70 to 80.

How can I increase my domain authority?

Only indirectly. Because the score is built from links, the levers are: earn links from domains that don't already link to you, publish material other sites have a reason to cite, clean up spammy or broken links, and fix the technical issues that waste the authority you already have. Chasing the number itself — buying links, swapping links in bulk — is what the Spam Score exists to catch.

Is domain authority a Google ranking factor?

No. Domain Authority is Moz's own model, built to predict Google's results from the outside. Google has never used it and does not publish anything equivalent. That distinction matters when a client or a link seller quotes a DA figure at you: it is a useful comparison between two domains, not evidence of anything Google thinks.

Do I need Moz Pro to check domain authority?

No. The free Moz Community account covers occasional lookups through Link Explorer and the MozBar. Moz Pro becomes worth it when you want tracked rankings, weekly site crawls and higher query limits: the entry-level Starter plan is $49 per month ($39 billed annually) and covers one website, which is the right size for most freelancers and small businesses. Above it, Standard is $99 per month ($79 annually), Medium $179 ($143) and Large $299 ($239). Prices as of August 2026 — Moz's own pricing page is authoritative.