The lead post in this series is Mastering Topical Authority: A Comprehensive Guide to Boost Your SEO.
For reasons stated below, this post became a “What is domain authority?” post almost immediately when I started writing it.
Jump ahead to:
Introduction
In the spirit of full disclosure, I used a topical mapping tool (specifically AlsoAsked) to generate a list of possible blog topics and titles based on search queries people have submitted.
While this one caught me by surprise as domain authority is a pretty simple and straight forward concept, I decided to write this post, as best I can, based on it being a search phrase that has some search volume.
As mentioned above, this post immediately “What is domain authority” followed by a few specific examples, and information on how to easily determine the domain authority of any site.
Domain authority is…
A metric, created many years ago by Moz, back when they were SEO Moz.
It is a numeric value from 1 to 100.
Only the biggest and busiest sites have a domain authority of 100. Sites such as Google, YouTube, LinkedIn, etc.
Domain authority is an overall metric of how authoritative your site is, independent of what the site is about and independent of how many things the site is about.
The metric is calculated from a variety of measuring attributes, such as how many links there are to the site, from how many different domains, and from how many different top level domains (.com, .gov, .edu, .ie, .uk, etc).
Examples of domain authority
This is is accurate as of 4 March 2024.
- YouTube.com: DA = 100
- Quora.com: DA = 93
- Muckrack.com: DA = 85
- Petfinder.com: DA = 72
- Carmax.com: DA = 66
- Vroom.com: DA = 56
- Bakerbookhouse.com: DA = 43
- thebookstorelr.com: DA = 3
That last one is a local used book store in Little Rock Arkansas, hence the “lr” at the end of the site name.
Determining domain authority
Moz provides a free Chrome plugin named MozBar that displays the domain authority (and a few others details) at the top of whatever webpage you’re looking at as well as on almost every search result that shows in a Google SERP.
I’m not sure why it’s “almost every” rather than “every” but sometimes a site shows up without an accompanying MozBar display.
To use MozBar you need an account at Moz, but they provide free accounts for MozBar users.
In closing
Domain authority is a commonly used metric, is abbreviated as DA, and is commonly used as a filtering metric by people who are proactive about link building.
The idea, which is valid, is that links from high DA sites convey more value to your site than links from low DA sites.
