How to increase domain authority (and what the score actually measures)
Domain authority rises when your site earns links from more unique, relevant and trusted domains than the sites it is scored against. Nothing else moves it in a way you will notice. The score is a Moz estimate of link strength, not a Google ranking signal, so treat it as a thermometer for your link profile rather than a target in itself. Ahrefs Domain Rating and Semrush Authority Score are the same idea from different vendors, and the work that lifts one lifts all three.
How to increase domain authority: the short answer
To increase domain authority, earn links from more unique, relevant and trusted domains, and stop wasting the links you already have. That is four jobs, in this order:
- Reclaim what you have earned. Fix inbound links that now point at broken or redirected URLs, and ask for a link on pages that mention you without one.
- Collect the links you already have a claim to. Suppliers, partners, clients, industry bodies and the few directories that matter in your sector will link to you if you ask.
- Publish something worth citing and pitch it. One piece of original data or a definitive guide earns more linking domains than a year of ordinary posts.
- Remove the rubbish. Disavow the spam links you cannot get removed, so the score is not held back by a penalty.
Title tags, page speed, mobile layout, social shares and domain age do not move the score, whatever older guides say. They matter for rankings and for users, but the score only reads links. Expect the first visible movement in three to six months.
What domain authority, domain rating and authority score actually are
All three are third-party estimates of a domain’s link profile, scored up to 100 by an SEO software vendor. None of them is published or read by Google. Each vendor builds its own link index, trains a model on it and reports a number that predicts how well a domain should rank against the other domains in that index.
Moz Domain Authority (DA). Moz’s learning centre says DA runs from 1 to 100, that new sites start at 1, and that a machine learning model calculates it from the number of linking root domains, the quality of those links and dozens of other factors that correlate with rankings across thousands of search results. Moz describes DA as relative, not static and not a Google ranking factor, and publishes no fixed refresh schedule: the score moves whenever the index or the model changes.
Ahrefs Domain Rating (DR). Ahrefs scores the strength of a backlink profile from 0 to 100 on a logarithmic scale. Its glossary says DR depends on how many unique referring domains link to a site, the DR of those domains, and how many other sites each of them links to. Nofollow links do not count. Ahrefs’ help centre says its backlink index is updated with fresh data every 15 to 30 minutes, so DR moves as the index moves.
Semrush Authority Score (AS). Semrush scores domains from 1 to 100 using three groups of inputs: link power (the quality and quantity of backlinks), an estimate of monthly organic traffic, and spam factors that look for an unnatural profile, such as many referring domains on one IP network. Its knowledge base says Authority Scores for all domains are updated once every two weeks. Because organic traffic is an input, AS can move when rankings move.
Is domain authority a Google ranking factor?
No. Google does not use Domain Authority, Domain Rating or Authority Score, and Moz’s own documentation says DA is not a Google ranking factor and has no effect on search results. Google’s search representatives have said the same in public for years.
The score still correlates with rankings, and that is why people confuse the two. Links are a real ranking input at Google, and DA is a proxy for links. A site with a strong link profile tends to have a high DA and tends to rank, but the ranking comes from the links, not from the number. This is how domain authority aids organic SEO: as a planning and benchmarking tool. It tells you whether your link profile is behind the sites you compete with and whether your link building is working. It does not rank you.
Page authority versus domain authority
Page authority scores one URL and domain authority scores the whole root domain. Moz calculates both the same way, from the same index, on the same logarithmic scale, but PA reads the links pointing at a single page while DA reads everything pointing at the domain.
That is why a page on a DA 20 site can outrank a page on a DA 60 site: it matches the query better, has links pointing at that specific page, or answers the intent behind the search more directly. Domain-level strength helps, but Google ranks pages, not domains. For a particular service page, the links pointing at that page and the internal links to it matter more than the sitewide number.
What happened to MozRank and MozTrust
Moz no longer publishes MozRank or MozTrust as standalone scores. Its page authority documentation still lists “MozTrust + MozRank” among the internal inputs to Page Authority, so the ideas survive inside the model. The work that moved them, links from trusted domains, is the same work that moves DA today, alongside keeping Moz’s Spam Score low.
Why the score moves, and why it can drop when you did nothing wrong
Domain authority is relative, so your number can fall while your link profile is improving. Moz recalibrates the scale against the whole web. When large sites gain millions of links they take up more of the high-DA range, and every other domain is pushed down a little. A competitor earning a run of links lowers your relative position even though nothing on your site changed.
The scale is also logarithmic. Moving from 20 to 30 takes a modest number of new linking domains, and 60 to 70 takes a great many more, because each point higher represents a larger share of the web’s link strength. Small sites see fast early gains and then a slowdown that is the shape of the scale, not a failure of the work.
Then there is the index. Every vendor recrawls the web on its own cycle, so links you earned last month may not be counted yet, and links you had may have been removed, set to nofollow or lost when the linking site closed or its domain expired. Spam filtering tightens and discounts links that used to count. Model updates change the weighting. Each of these can move the score a few points with no action from you, which is why one monthly reading tells you little and a six-month trend tells you a lot.
What moves domain authority, ranked by weight
Six inputs move the score, and they are not equal. In order of weight:
1. The number of unique linking root domains. One link from each of 50 different sites does far more than 50 links from one site. Every vendor counts domains before it counts links, and this is the single number to grow.
2. The authority of those domains. A link from a site that itself has many linking domains carries more weight than one from a site nobody links to. Ten links from established news, government, university or industry sites will outweigh a hundred from new blogs.
3. Topical relevance of the linking pages. A link from a page about your subject, on a site about your industry, counts for more than a link from an unrelated page. Relevance matters more to Google than to the vendor models, so it is worth more to your rankings than to your score.
4. Natural link velocity and anchor text. Links that arrive steadily, from varied sources, with anchor text that is mostly your brand name or a plain description, look earned. A sudden burst of links with exact-match commercial anchors looks bought, and the spam detection in Moz’s and Semrush’s models is built to spot it. Our guide to backlinks that matter covers how to earn the first kind.
5. Removing or disavowing spam links. Moz reports a Spam Score and treats a high score as a penalty within DA. Semrush builds six spam indicators into Authority Score. Links from link farms, hacked sites and paid networks hold the score down and can attract a manual action from Google. Cleaning them up does not add authority, but it stops the leak.
6. Crawlability and internal linking. Internal links do not add domain authority, because the score only counts links from other domains. They do decide where the authority you have lands. Deep pages that nothing links to internally receive almost nothing, while a crawlable site with a sensible internal link structure lifts the page authority of the pages that need to rank.
A 90-day plan to increase domain authority
This is the plan PWD runs for a new link building client, scaled down to one person with a few hours a week. It needs no paid tools, and it produces linking domains before it produces a score change, which is the right order.
Days 1 to 30: benchmark, clean up and reclaim
Record the baseline before you touch anything: DA, DR and Authority Score, plus the number of linking root domains reported by each tool.
Export your backlinks from Google Search Console’s Links report and from Ahrefs Webmaster Tools, which is free for verified sites. Combine the lists, then find the links you are losing:
- Inbound links pointing at URLs that now return 404. Redirect the old URL to the closest live page.
- Inbound links pointing through redirect chains. Shorten each to a single hop.
- Links that were live in a previous export and are gone. Email the site and ask why.
Fix crawl errors and redirect chains inside your own site at the same time, so the authority you reclaim reaches its destination.
Finish the month with a target list. Take ten competitors that rank for your terms, export their referring domains, and keep every domain that links to at least three of them. They are your first outreach targets.
Days 31 to 60: earn the first new links
Publish one linkable asset. The format matters less than the substance: original data from your own operations, a survey of your customers, a local price index, a calculator, or a definitive guide to something your industry argues about. It needs to be the piece a journalist or a blogger would cite because it saves them work.
While it is being written, collect the links you already have a claim to:
- Claim unlinked brand mentions: search your business name in quotes and ask the pages that name you without linking for the link.
- Ask suppliers and partners for a listing on their stockists, partners or clients page, and offer the same in return.
- List with the industry bodies you belong to and the two or three directories people in your sector use. Check that each listing page is indexed and the link is followed before you pay for anything.
- Pitch one or two guest contributions to publications your customers read.
Our guide to easy link building strategies walks through each of these with examples. Then pitch the asset to the target list from month one and to the journalists covering your sector.
Days 61 to 90: repeat what worked and measure the right thing
By now one tactic will have produced most of the links. Do more of that one and drop the rest. If partner links came easily, go through every partner. If the asset earned coverage, publish a second one.
Report on linking root domains and referring domain growth against the day-one baseline, then check the three scores. Expect the domain count to move first and the scores to lag by one or more index refreshes. Domains up and scores flat means the plan is working and the vendors have not caught up. If the domains are flat, change the tactic, not the timeline.
How to build domain authority fast: what is actually possible
On a low-scoring site you can move a few points in weeks by reclaiming lost links and fixing technical waste, and that is the ceiling for fast, honest movement. Anything quicker is bought links, and bought links produce a number that means nothing.
Private blog networks, link farms and the “DA 50 guest post” marketplaces sell links from domains whose score is inflated by the same manufactured links. Moz’s Spam Score and Semrush’s spam factors are built to discount that pattern, so the purchased links raise your spam signals along with the headline number. Google’s spam policies treat paid links that pass ranking signals as a violation, and a manual action costs more rankings than the links ever added. The number you buy is hollow: it does not come with the rankings it is supposed to predict.
The free methods are the ones that last. Reclaiming lost links, claiming unlinked mentions, partner and supplier links, journalist request services and a linkable asset written in-house cost nothing but time. Time is the real price of domain authority, and it is why the fast versions are all fake.
How long does it take to increase domain authority?
Expect the first visible movement in three to six months, and expect a sustained climb of ten or more points to take a year on a young or small site. Links take time to earn, because every one depends on another person publishing something. The tools refresh on their own cycle, so a link earned today is counted weeks later. And the logarithmic scale steepens as you climb.
What realistic movement looks like by starting band:
| Starting score | What to expect with steady work |
|---|---|
| Under 20 | The fastest gains on the scale. Reclaimed links and a first round of partner and directory links can move it within a quarter. |
| 20 to 40 | Steady movement while new linking domains keep arriving each month. Growth stalls the moment outreach stops. |
| 40 to 60 | Slower. Partner and directory links are mostly used up, and movement depends on linkable assets and coverage from established sites. |
| Over 60 | Slow and hard-won. Each point needs links from sites with authority of their own. |
The number to watch during the wait is linking root domains. It moves before the score, and it tells you whether the work is producing links.
How to increase page authority and domain authority together
Point internal links from your strongest pages at the page you want to lift. Page authority responds to links pointing at that specific URL, from other sites and from your own, so a strong homepage or a popular guide can pass authority to a service page that has none. Our internal linking guide covers anchor text, placement and how many links a page can carry.
Consolidate thin pages that split link equity. Three weak pages on the same topic, each with a couple of inbound links, do less than one page with all six. Merge them, redirect the old URLs to the survivor and update the internal links.
Earn links to deep pages, not only the homepage. Homepage-only links raise DA and leave the page authority of your money pages flat, because the authority has to travel through your internal links to reach them. A link from an industry site straight to your service page raises both scores and does more for that page’s rankings than the same link to your homepage.
How to show authority on your website (the kind Google actually reads)
Google measures authority through experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust signals on the page, not through a Moz number. Its search quality rater guidelines describe what those signals look like, and none of them is a score you can buy.
On the page, that means:
- Author bios with real names, roles and credentials, linked to an author page.
- An about page with real people, a physical address and a history you can verify.
- Sources cited for every claim, linked to the original document.
- Original research, data or worked examples that exist nowhere else.
- Reviews on platforms you do not control, and certifications that can be checked on a register.
- Consistent name, address and phone number across your site, Google Business Profile and directories.
Off the page, the signal is being cited by others: trade press, coverage, the organisations you belong to. This is the overlap with domain authority: the same earned links raise the third-party score and show Google that other people trust you. Build for the second and the first follows.
How to track domain authority without obsessing over it
Track linking root domains, referring domain growth, organic sessions and positions for your target keywords every month, and check DA, DR and Authority Score once a quarter. The monthly numbers show whether the work is producing links and traffic. The quarterly scores confirm the trend.
Chasing the score itself leads to buying links, because the shortest route to a monthly DA target is a marketplace, and that is where the spam detection sends you backwards. Report on domains and traffic, and let the score be a lagging confirmation.
When to hand link building to an agency
Hand link building to an agency when you have content worth linking to but no time for outreach, when your sector is competitive enough that partner and directory links are exhausted, or when a previous provider bought links and Spam Score is climbing. Outreach is the bottleneck in every plan above.
PWD’s link building services are delivered in-house from our West Leederville office: the outreach, the content written for host sites and the reporting. We do not buy links or use private blog networks, and we report every link earned with its URL, alongside referring domain growth, rather than a score. There are no lock-in contracts.
Frequently asked questions
Is DA the same as DR?
No. DA is Moz’s score and DR is Ahrefs’ score. Both estimate the strength of a domain’s link profile on a logarithmic scale up to 100, but each comes from its vendor’s own link index and model, so the two numbers for the same site usually differ. Compare DA with DA and DR with DR.
What is a good domain authority for a small business?
There is no universal good score, because the number is relative to the sites you compete with. A local business competing with other local businesses can rank well with a modest score, while a national brand competing with publishers cannot. Check the scores of the sites ranking for your target terms and aim to match or exceed them.
Can you increase DA without backlinks?
Not meaningfully. DA is calculated from links pointing at your domain, so on-page SEO, content quality, page speed and mobile layout do not move it on their own. They matter for rankings and they make your pages worth linking to, which is how they contribute indirectly. A score that has not moved means not enough new linking domains.
Does buying links raise domain authority?
Sometimes in the short term, and never in a way that helps. Purchased links from inflated domains can lift the number while raising Moz’s Spam Score and tripping the spam indicators in Semrush’s model. Google’s spam policies treat paid links that pass ranking signals as a violation, so the same links can attract a manual action that costs rankings.
How often should you check your score?
Quarterly is enough. The score lags the links by one or more index refreshes and moves a few points on its own as the scale is recalibrated, so monthly readings produce noise. Track linking root domains and organic traffic monthly instead, because they move first and they are what the score is supposed to predict.
Does social media increase domain authority?
No. Links from social platforms are nofollow or discounted, and none of the three vendor models counts social shares as an input. Social media can put a linkable asset in front of the journalists and site owners who do link. The share itself adds nothing to the score.
Get a backlink gap review from PWD
If you want to know why your score is where it is, start with the gap. PWD will pull your referring domains and those of three named competitors, show you which sites link to them and not to you, and give you a written list of the first ten targets. It is delivered by our in-house Perth team with no lock-in contract.
Get a backlink gap review from PWD, or call 08 6146 0195.
