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What is Domain Authority? (And How to Improve It Fast)

May 29, 2026
Informational
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Nobody told me what domain authority was when I started my blog. I would see people in Facebook groups saying things like ‘your DA is too low’ or ‘focus on building your DA first’ and I would just nod along pretending I understood.

I did not understand. Not even a little bit.

So I went and looked it up. And honestly? The explanations I found were terrible. Full of technical language that made zero sense to a beginner. I had to dig through about fifteen different articles before it finally clicked for me.

So here is the explanation I wish someone had given me on day one. Plain words, real examples, no jargon. By the end of this you will know exactly what domain authority is, why it matters, and what you can actually do to improve yours.

Okay, So What is Domain Authority?

Domain Authority most people just call it DA is basically a score that tells you how strong and trustworthy your website looks to search engines. The score goes from 0 all the way up to 100.

A brand new blog starts at 0 or 1. A massive site like Wikipedia sits somewhere above 90. Most regular blogs and websites sit somewhere between 10 and 45.

Think of it like a reputation score for your website. The higher your score, the more Google sees your site as credible. And the more credible your site is, the better your chances of showing up on page one of search results.

Easy way to think about it: Imagine DA is like a trust rating. A new restaurant with no reviews has low trust. A restaurant that has been around for years with thousands of good reviews has high trust. Google thinks about your website the same way.

Who Made This Score and Why Does Everyone Talk About It?

Domain Authority was created by a company called Moz. They are one of the biggest names in the SEO world and they built this metric specifically to help website owners understand how their site compares to others.

Here is why bloggers care about it so much. When you are trying to rank for a keyword on Google, you are competing against other websites. If your DA is 12 and the sites already ranking for that keyword all have DA 60 or above, the odds are heavily stacked against you. Knowing your DA helps you pick battles you can actually win.

One thing that confuses a lot of people: Domain Authority is NOT made by Google. It is Moz's own measurement. Google has their own internal ranking system which they never share publicly. But DA is still incredibly useful as a guide because the things that raise your DA are the same things Google rewards.

What DA Score Should You Be Aiming For?

This is honestly the question I get asked most. And the real answer is: stop comparing your score to random websites and start comparing it to whoever is actually ranking for the keywords you want.

That said, here is a rough breakdown so you have some context:

DA 1 to 20 Brand new or very young blog. Completely normal. Every single successful website started here. Do not panic about this number.
DA 21 to 40 You have been around for a while, picked up some backlinks, and built some content. This is where you start competing for medium difficulty keywords.
DA 41 to 60 Solid established website. Years of consistent work has paid off. You can go after more competitive keywords at this stage.
DA 61 to 80 Major websites, well-known news outlets, big brands. Hard to reach this without serious long-term effort.
DA 81 to 100 Wikipedia, YouTube, Amazon, the BBC. These are the giants. You are not competing with them directly, ever.

Real talk for new bloggers: If your blog is a few months old and your DA is somewhere between 5 and 15, that is completely fine. The only thing that matters is the trend. Is it going up? Even slowly? That means you are doing things right. Stop comparing yourself to sites that have been online for five years.

Four Pages You Absolutely Cannot Skip

This was actually the reason my first application was rejected. I had decent content but I was missing these pages. Do not make the same mistake.

You need all four of these before applying:

About Us Tell your readers who you are, your background, and what your blog is about. Make it genuine. A two-line about page will not impress Google.
Contact Us Google wants to know they can reach you if something goes wrong. A simple contact form or your email address is enough.
Privacy Policy This is non-negotiable. It is required by law in many countries and Google will not approve you without it. The good news is you can generate one for free online in about 2 minutes.
Disclaimer Especially important if you give advice of any kind on your blog. It protects you legally too, so this one is worth having regardless.

How Does Moz Actually Calculate Your DA Score?

You do not need to understand every detail of this but knowing the basics helps you focus on the right things. The biggest factor by far is backlinks.

A backlink is when another website links to yours. Every time this happens it is like that website casting a vote for you saying hey, this content is good enough to reference. The more of these votes you collect, and the more trustworthy the websites giving you those votes are, the higher your DA climbs.

One link from a major news website is worth more than a hundred links from tiny unknown blogs with no traffic. Quality absolutely beats quantity here.

Other things that affect your DA include:

How many total pages your website has more content means more surface area for Google to evaluate
How long your domain has been registered older domains generally have more trust
How fast your site loads and whether it works properly on mobile phones
Whether other high-authority sites in your niche are linking to you

That is basically it. Backlinks are the main engine. Everything else is supporting factors.

Domain Authority vs Page Authority What is the Difference?

These two get mixed up all the time so let me clear it up quickly.

Domain Authority is about your entire website. It looks at yourblog.com as a whole and gives the whole domain a single score.

Page Authority is about one specific page. So your homepage might have a PA of 25 while one particular article that got shared a lot might have a PA of 40 because it earned more individual backlinks.

Both use the same 0 to 100 scale. When most people talk about improving their SEO strength, they are talking about DA. But PA matters too when you are trying to rank a specific article for a specific keyword.

How Do You Actually Check Your Domain Authority?

Good news it is free. Several ways to check:

Moz Link Explorer

Go to moz.com/link-explorer, type in your URL, and Moz will show you your DA score along with your backlink count and other useful data. The free version gives you a few searches per day which is plenty for checking your own site monthly.

MozBar Chrome Extension

This one is my personal favourite. Install it from the Chrome Web Store for free. Once it is installed, every time you search something on Google you will see the DA score of every website right there in the search results. This is brilliant for quickly sizing up your competition before you decide to write about a topic.

Ahrefs Free Authority Checker

Go to ahrefs.com/website-authority-checker and enter your site. Ahrefs calls their version Domain Rating or DR rather than DA but it measures essentially the same thing. Checking both gives you a fuller picture.

Small SEO Tools Bulk Checker

If you want to check your site and a bunch of competitor sites all at once, smallseotools.com has a free bulk DA checker. Paste in multiple URLs and it spits out the DA for all of them together. Very handy for competitor research.

Check your DA once a month at most. It changes slowly and checking it every day will just stress you out for no reason. Set a reminder on the first of each month, check it, note the change, move on.

Right, So How Do You Actually Improve It?

Now for the part everyone actually came here for. Here is what genuinely moves the needle and I want to be upfront that none of this is fast. But all of it works.

Get Quality Backlinks This is the Big One

There is no way around this. Backlinks are what drives DA growth more than anything else. You need other websites to link to your content.

Practical ways to actually get this done:

Write guest posts for other blogs in your niche. Include a natural link back to a relevant article on your own site. This is one of the fastest ways to earn quality backlinks.
Create content that is genuinely the best resource on a topic. Detailed guides, original data, useful tools, helpful infographics this kind of content gets shared and linked to naturally over time.
When you find an article on another blog that covers a topic you have written about in more depth, reach out to the author and let them know. Some will add your link as an additional resource.
Get listed in legitimate online directories and resource pages relevant to your niche.

Stay far away from buying backlinks or using sketchy link-building services that promise hundreds of links for a few dollars. Google actively hunts for this kind of artificial link building and penalizes sites that do it. One penalty can destroy years of work overnight. Earn your links the right way.

Keep Publishing Good Content Consistently

Every article you publish is another opportunity for someone to discover your blog and link to it. The more genuinely useful content you have, the more chances you create for natural backlinks to happen.

Do not just publish for the sake of publishing. Write articles that are actually better than what is already out there. Ask yourself if someone reads this, will they walk away actually knowing something they did not know before? If yes, you are on the right track.

Site Loads Too Slowly or Looks Bad on Mobile

More than 60 percent of internet users browse on their phones. If your blog looks broken or takes forever to load on mobile, Google notices. They want to send their advertisers’ ads to sites that provide a good user experience.

Check your site on your phone right now. Also run it through pagespeed.web.dev to see your speed score. If you are below 60 on mobile, fix that before applying.

Sort Out Your Technical SEO

A slow, broken, or hard-to-use website sends bad signals. Run your site through pagespeed.web.dev and aim for a score above 80 on mobile. Make sure you have an SSL certificate active that is the padlock icon in the browser bar. Fix any broken links or 404 error pages. These small things add up.

Internal Linking Do Not Skip This

Every time you publish a new article, go back to two or three older articles and add a link from them to the new one. This takes about five minutes and helps search engines understand how your content connects. It also spreads the authority around your site more evenly.

Build this habit from day one: publish new article, then immediately update two older articles with a link to it. Five minutes per article. Massive difference over time.

How Long Until You See Results?

This is the honest part. Domain Authority grows slowly. That is just the reality of it.

Going from DA 1 to DA 20 can take six months to a year of consistent work. Pushing from 20 to 40 takes even longer because you are competing with more established sites. The higher you climb, the slower the progress feels.

But here is the thing most beginners miss. You do not need a high DA to start getting traffic. With a DA of even 10 to 15, you can absolutely rank for low competition keywords and start building a real audience. I know bloggers who make good money from AdSense with a DA under 25 because they chose their keywords smartly.

Stop obsessing over the number. Focus on the work and the number will follow the work not the other way around.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Does DA directly affect my Google rankings?

Not directly, because DA is Moz’s metric, not Google’s. But here is the thing the exact activities that raise your DA are also what Google’s algorithm rewards. Better backlinks, better content, better technical SEO. Improve your DA and your Google rankings almost always improve too. They go hand in hand.

My DA suddenly dropped. Should I panic?

Almost certainly not. DA scores are updated regularly by Moz and small fluctuations up and down are completely normal. If you saw a bigger drop, check whether any sites that were linking to you have removed those links. Also check if you recently lost any high-quality backlinks. But a drop of a few points here and there is nothing to worry about.

Can a new blog with low DA actually rank on Google?

Yes but you have to be strategic about it. A blog with DA 10 is not going to outrank DA 70 sites for competitive keywords. That is just realistic. But for long-tail keywords with low competition, even a new site can rank. The key is picking the right battles at the right time. Start low, build your authority, and go after bigger keywords as your DA grows.

Ahrefs says DR and Moz says DA. Are they the same thing?

Different tools, similar concept. Both measure your site’s overall authority and trustworthiness based on backlinks. Neither score comes from Google. Moz calls it Domain Authority. Ahrefs calls it Domain Rating. Many SEO people check both because they use slightly different data. If both scores are trending up, that is a great sign regardless of which tool you prefer.

Wrapping It Up

Domain authority is not some mysterious magical number. It is just a score that reflects how much trust and credibility your website has built up mainly through backlinks and good content.

If your score is low right now, that is fine. It was low for every successful blogger at the beginning. What matters is that you now understand what actually moves it earning genuine backlinks, publishing content worth linking to, and keeping your site technically healthy.

Check it monthly. Not daily. Focus your energy on creating content that genuinely helps people, and the DA will take care of itself over time.

Now stop worrying about the number and go write something great.