What is a good Domain Authority score?

What Domain Authority is

Domain Authority is a score Moz created to predict how well a website will rank. It runs from 1 to 100, and higher scores mean a greater likelihood of ranking. Moz calculates it from its own link data, including how many different root domains link to a site and how many links it has in total. In 2019 Moz rebuilt the score as Domain Authority 2.0 with a bigger link index and its Spam Score folded in.

Two facts shape everything else:

• Google doesn’t use it. Moz itself says Domain Authority is not a Google ranking factor and has no effect on search results. It’s an estimate built from links, which Google does care about.
• The scale is logarithmic. Moving from 70 to 80 is far harder than moving from 20 to 30, so the gap between two high scores is bigger than it looks.

Why there’s no single good score

Moz describes DA as a relative metric: a score of 30 might be excellent in one niche and low in another. A plumber competing with other local plumbers faces a very different field from a software company competing with national brands. Picking a number like 40 or 50 as the target ignores the only thing that matters, which is the sites you’re actually up against in search.

How to judge your Domain Authority

1. List your competition in search. Take three to five searches you want to rank for and write down the sites on page one. These are often different from your business competitors.
2. Note their scores. Look up each site’s DA, or DR if you use Ahrefs. Use one tool for all of them, since the two companies’ numbers don’t line up.
3. Compare. If you’re within the range of the sites ranking, links probably aren’t what’s holding you back, and content and relevance are the fight. If you’re far below all of them, you need more sites linking to you.
4. Then compare pages. Google ranks pages, so check the Page Authority of the exact pages ranking, too. A strong domain with a weak page can be beaten.

When checking DA is useful

• Sizing up a search before you write for it. If every result belongs to a far stronger site, pick a narrower search first.
• Vetting a site you might get a link from. Score is one signal. Also ask whether the site gets real search traffic, covers your topic, and doesn’t link out to everyone.
• Tracking progress over months. A rising score usually means your link earning is working. Day-to-day moves mean little.

When it isn’t

DA can’t tell you whether a page deserves to rank. It doesn’t read your content, check your speed, or know what searchers want. A site with a lower score and a better answer often wins. If you catch yourself chasing the number itself, switch back to earning links and improving pages; the score follows those, not the other way around. How to increase Domain Authority covers the methods that work.

DA, DR and the other scores

Ahrefs’ Domain Rating does the same job with different data, which is why a site’s two scores rarely match. Domain Authority vs Domain Rating explains the differences. If you work in Ahrefs’ numbers, SERP DR keeps a free public DR page for any domain and offers weekly DR tracking on its paid plan.