Domain Authority (DA)
TL;DR
A Moz-developed 1–100 score predicting a website's ability to rank in search engines, based primarily on the quality and quantity of backlinks.
Domain Authority (DA) is a proprietary metric developed by Moz that predicts how likely a website is to rank in search engine results pages (SERPs) on a logarithmic scale from 1 to 100. A higher DA score indicates stronger ranking potential, with scores above 50 considered strong and above 70 considered excellent.
DA is calculated based primarily on the website's backlink profile: the number of unique referring domains, the authority of those domains, and the relevance of the linking pages. It is a comparative metric — useful for benchmarking a site against competitors — rather than a direct ranking factor used by Google.
Complementary metrics include Domain Rating (DR) by Ahrefs, which operates on a similar principle, and URL Rating (UR) for individual pages. While not a Google metric, DA and DR are widely used as proxies for site authority in link building campaigns, guest posting partnerships, and SEO reporting.
Examples in Practice
Wikipedia has DA 95. A brand-new blog starts at DA 1. Most established business websites sit between DA 20–50.