What is Domain Authority?

How the score gets calculated

Moz builds it almost entirely from its own link index, weighing how many domains link to you, how strong each of those domains is, and the shape of the profile overall, on a logarithmic scale where climbing from 20 to 30 takes real work and climbing from 60 to 70 takes far more.

Because the score is relative, it shifts whenever Moz refreshes its index or whenever other sites in the comparison set gain links faster than you do, which means your number can fall in a month where your organic traffic actually grew. That happens often. It confuses people every time.

Ahrefs Domain Rating runs on similar principles across a different index, which is exactly why the two figures rarely agree for the same site.

How the metric gets misused

Setting it as a client KPI. An agency in Noida reporting that it raised your Domain Authority from 24 to 31 across a six-month retainer, while organic revenue sat completely flat, has reported nothing that pays anybody’s salary. Rankings, qualified sessions, enquiries. Those are the numbers.

Using it as a hard filter for outreach is the other trap, because rejecting a niche Indian property blog scoring 18 while happily accepting an unrelated general site scoring 55 gets your priorities exactly backwards. Relevance beats the score.

It is also straightforward to inflate, since pointing enough low-quality links at a domain will lift the number for a while, and that is precisely why link sellers quote it to you in the first place.

What this looks like in practice

Use it to sanity-check a prospective link source in about ten seconds, alongside actual traffic and topical fit, because for an e-commerce brand comparing itself against three Delhi NCR competitors the relative gap is mildly informative while the absolute figure tells you almost nothing worth acting on.

Pair it with something real: estimated organic traffic to the specific page that would carry your link, whether that page ranks for anything at all, and whether its subject sits anywhere near yours. Report enquiries to the client instead. Calls booked, not a monthly recalculation.