The lead post in this series is Mastering Topical Authority: A Comprehensive Guide to Boost Your SEO.
Jump ahead to:
Introduction
The short answer is no, they’re not, but they’re related, sort of.
But for that answer to be meaningful, it’s necessary to review the concepts, similarities, and differences, for both domain authority and authority score.
Domain authority
This is a proprietary metric created by Moz in the early days of SEO and is reported by their SEO reporting tool Link Explorer.
Authority score
This is also a proprietary metric. This one was created by SEMrush and is reported by their SEO reporting tool which is also named Link Explorer.
Similarities
Both metrics are are intended to predict how likely pages from a target site are likely to appear in search metrics, and how valuable a backlink from the site is likely to be.
Differences
Domain authority is calculated primarily from number of unique linking root domains (.com, .gov, .edu, .uk, etc), and the total number of links.
Authority score is based on a sites backlink profile as well as the estimated monthly traffic levels, and a site’s “spam factor” which is a measure of how much of that is the result of “manipulation”.
In closing
They’re not the same, but they are used in similar ways, and many people do in fact consider them to be “equivalent enough”.
