What Is Domain Authority?
A 0 to 100 estimate, invented by a tool vendor, of how strong a domain's inbound link profile is next to every other domain. Not a Google metric, not used in ranking, and logarithmic, so the top of the scale is far harder than the bottom.
Domain authority is a third-party estimate, on a 0 to 100 scale, of how strong a domain's inbound link profile is next to every other domain. Roughly 2,100 of the 11,242 listings in the Revised directory reach the top of our own equivalent scale, and about four in five of those pass a low spam screen, counted on 16 September 2026 from our own web crawl and spam-screened before listing. A tool vendor invented the metric and Google does not publish or use it. The scale is logarithmic, so moving from 20 to 30 is ordinary and moving from 70 to 80 is rare. Because it is relative, no score counts as good on its own.
The vendor that owns the metric is explicit about its standing:
Domain Authority is not a Google ranking factor and has no effect on the SERPs.
Moz, "Domain Authority: What is it and how is it calculated", read on 16 September 2026.
What is domain authority, exactly?
It is one company's prediction, published as a number.
Moz defines it as "a search engine ranking score developed by Moz" that "predicts how likely a website is to rank on search engine results pages (SERPs) compared to competitors", on a scale of 1 to 100. The input is link data from Moz's own index, run through a model trained against real search results.
Three consequences follow, and they are the whole of the practical advice. It is comparative, so a score means nothing without the scores of the pages you compete with. It is proprietary, so only the vendor can report it, and another vendor's number for the same domain will differ. It is link-based, so what moves it is links from domains that did not link you before.
Moz also notes that new websites always begin at a Domain Authority of 1, which is worth knowing before reading much into a low number on a name you just registered.
Is domain authority a Google ranking factor?
No, and Google publishes no domain-level authority score of any kind.
Google's own description of what links do contains no score and no domain-level rollup. Its link best practices document says Google "uses links as a signal when determining the relevancy of pages and to find new pages to crawl", and its guide to how Search works says relevancy is "determined by hundreds of factors".
So a domain authority score is a vendor's model of an outcome, not a component of it. Useful as a comparison, misleading as a target. A page can outrank a higher-scoring domain on any given query, and does constantly.
What is a good domain authority score?
The honest answer is by context, not by number.
Moz says so itself. "There's no universal 'good' or 'average' Domain Authority score because it's a relative metric." What matters is the range on the pages ranking for your terms.
| Where you are looking | What the range usually means |
|---|---|
| The pages ranking for your target query | The only benchmark that matters. Compare against the weakest of them. |
| An unanswered long-tail question | Often winnable against low scores, because the competing pages have few links. |
| A commercial head term | Dominated by domains that took years to get there. A score gap here is a time estimate. |
| A domain you are considering registering | Read it with the site history and the referring-domain count. A snapshot on a dropped name describes links earned before the drop. |
Anyone quoting a target like "get to 40" is quoting a number that has no meaning outside a specific set of competitors.
Why does the scale get harder at the top?
Because it is logarithmic rather than linear.
Moz puts the effect plainly. The curve "explains why it's easier to grow your score from 20 to 30 than it is to grow it from 70 to 80". Link data follows a power law, where a small number of domains hold a large share of all inbound links, so a linear percentile would compress almost the whole web into the bottom band. Every serious authority metric applies a log curve for that reason.
The practical version is that the same amount of work produces a big score move at the bottom and almost none at the top.
What is the difference between Domain Authority, Domain Rating and Revised Authority?
Different vendors run different link indexes, and each publishes its own number for a similar question about link standing.
- Domain Authority is Moz's score, from Moz's link index. Only Moz can tell you a domain's DA.
- Domain Rating is Ahrefs' equivalent, from Ahrefs' index. Ahrefs documents it in its glossary.
- Revised Authority is ours, computed from our own web crawl rather than licensed from anyone. It maps a domain's harmonic centrality rank and its PageRank rank in one crawl release onto 0 to 100 with a log-rank curve, weighted towards centrality, and shows both underlying ranks next to the number.
None of the three is Google's, and the three will not match each other. Our side-by-side comparison of Domain Authority, Domain Rating and Revised Authority works through where they disagree and which to use for what. You can check any domain's Revised Authority free, with no account, in the domain authority checker.
What does Revised measure, then?
We publish three numbers and they are three different things. Conflating them is the commonest mistake people make reading a listing.
Revised Score is the per-listing grade, 0 to 100, shown as a range rather than an exact figure. It blends centrality in our web crawl, referring domains and site history into one comparison point calculated across the whole directory, so a 70 on one listing means what a 70 does on another.
Revised Authority is the link-standing score on the domain authority checker, 0 to 100, computed from our web crawl for any domain you type in. It answers the question a domain authority check is usually asked.
Agent Citability is a different question again, scoring 0 to 100 on how deeply the reference, academic, government and editorial sources that answer engines lean on already reference a domain. It measures citability rather than citations, it predicts no engine's behaviour, and a score can fall as well as rise. The method and the source tiers are published; the weights are not.
If you want to move a number rather than read one, how to increase domain authority gives the ordered levers, and seeing a domain's authority over time covers why a single snapshot is the least useful reading of a dropped name.
Using the Revised directory for this
- Open high authority expired domains. It holds the 2,101 listings with a Revised Score of 65 or more as of 16 September 2026, across 21 top-level domains, with a median band of 50 to 100 referring domains. The filter on that page is Revised Score, not any vendor's Domain Authority, and we do not resell anyone's DA.
- Read the referring-domain band next to the score. 36 of those 2,101 listings have 250 or more referring domains, so the top of the range is a short list rather than a target.
- Read Linked by before either number. Who references a domain answers more than how strongly the graph scores it, and referring domains versus backlinks covers why the distinct-domain count is the one to read.
- Use the Open filter to work with named domains for nothing. 53 of the listings on the authority page are open, and 3,373 across the whole directory, about 30%, publish the name and the exact counts with no account. The rest need a reveal.
- Check any domain, listed or not, in the domain authority checker for its Revised Authority and the ranks behind it, then read its profile in the backlink checker, which lists each referring domain with the source page, anchor text and link type.
Every listing is spam-screened before it goes up, and 1,657 of the 2,101 on the authority page pass a low spam screen. A score is not a promise. Registering a domain with high link standing does not transfer a ranking, and the subject of what you publish has to match what the links were about.
FAQ
What is domain authority in SEO? A third-party score, on a 0 to 100 scale, estimating how strong a domain's inbound link profile is relative to other domains. Moz created the original version and other vendors publish their own equivalents. It is a prediction about ranking, not an input to it.
Is domain authority a Google ranking factor? No. Moz states that Domain Authority "is not a Google ranking factor and has no effect on the SERPs", and Google publishes no domain-level authority score at all.
What is a good domain authority score? Whatever beats the pages you actually compete with. Moz says there is no universal good or average score because the metric is relative. Read the range on the current top ten for your query instead of aiming at a round number.
What is a good free domain authority checker? Ours returns Revised Authority, our own 0 to 100 score computed from our web crawl, with the centrality and PageRank ranks behind it shown next to the number, free and with no signup. It is not Moz's DA, which only Moz can report.
Does an expired domain keep its domain authority? The links stay with the name while the linking pages stay live, so a score computed from those links persists until the index catches up. That is a statement about link data, not about rankings, and nothing about the score transfers to what you publish next.