You open an SEO report or log into a tool, and a number called domain authority appears next to your website. A competitor’s site has a higher number. The implication is clear, even though nobody has explained it: you are behind, and this number is the reason.
Before you act on that, before a budget gets pointed at the problem, it is worth spending ten minutes understanding what domain authority actually is, how it is calculated, and what a score in your range genuinely means. Because domain authority is one of the most cited numbers in digital marketing and one of the most consistently misread. The way it is typically presented makes it easy to over-interpret and act on in ways that do not actually move the needle.
This article answers both questions directly. What is domain authority? And is your score good, average, or something to address? No SEO background needed to follow along.
Domain authority is a score from 1 to 100 created by an SEO software company called Moz. It estimates how strong a website’s backlink profile is compared to every other website on the internet.
Breaking that down:
A score from 1 to 100
Higher is stronger. Lower is weaker. Brand-new websites start near 1. The biggest, most-linked sites in the world: Wikipedia, major news organisations, government domains, sit in the high nineties. The vast majority of business websites sit somewhere between 20 and 60.
This is the single most important thing to know: domain authority is not a Google metric. Moz is a private American SEO software company. They invented this score; they calculate it using their own data, and Google has confirmed it plays no part in search rankings. When you see domain authority in a report, you are looking at Moz’s assessment of your site, not Google’s.
A backlink is simply a link from one website pointing to yours. When a credible, well-known website links to your site, it passes a signal of trust. Domain authority is Moz’s way of measuring how many of those trust signals your site has collected and how credible the sites sending them are. More credible links from more independent sources, higher score. Few links or links from low-quality sources, lower score.
The score is calibrated against the full web. When Moz updates its index, scores across all sites can shift, not because your site changed, but because the benchmark moved.
The entire domain authority calculation is built on one thing: links from other websites pointing to yours. Moz’s algorithm reads those links at scale and weighs two things above everything else.
First, the number of unique websites linking to you, called referring domains. Getting ten links from ten different independent websites is stronger than getting ten links from the same website.
Second, the authority of those linking websites. One link from a nationally recognised publication carries far more weight than fifty links from obscure, low-traffic blogs. The credibility of the source matters as much as the count.
One high-quality link from a trusted source does more for your domain authority than dozens of links from sites nobody has heard of.
One important thing to understand before setting improvement targets: domain authority uses a logarithmic scale. This means progress gets harder the higher the score climbs.
Moving from DA 10 to DA 25 requires far less link acquisition than moving from DA 55 to DA 70. The numbers look evenly spaced. The effort required is not. Businesses that feel frustrated with slow domain authority progress are almost always those that were not told about this curve upfront.
Moz also regularly updates its web crawl and recalibrates scores across the internet. A score drop does not always mean your link profile weakened. It can simply mean Moz recalibrated its index. Context matters before concluding any single score change.
These two scores look similar and are often mentioned together, but they measure different things.
Domain authority is a score for your entire website, yourwebsite.com as a whole. It reflects the combined backlink strength of every page under that domain. Every individual page on your site benefits from and contributes to the overall domain authority score.
Page authority is the same type of score applied to one specific page, yourwebsite.com/one-specific-page. It measures the link strength pointing directly to that URL, separate from the wider domain.
A simple way to think about it: domain authority is like the overall reputation of a university.
Page authority is the reputation of one specific department within it.
The university’s strong reputation gives every department a head start, but a particular department can build its own standing through direct recognition.
Use domain authority when comparing website-level competitive strength. Use page authority when evaluating how well a specific URL is positioned for a specific keyword search.
The honest answer: it depends entirely on who you are competing with. There is no universal good domain authority score, the way there is a healthy blood pressure reading. A score of 32 can be very competitive in one industry and well behind in another. The only number that tells you whether your DA is adequate is the DA range of the sites currently ranking for your target keywords.
That said, the following table gives you a plain-language orientation of what each score range typically represents, useful context before you look at your specific competitive landscape.
|
Score |
What is a signal |
What it means in practice |
|
1- 20 |
New/early stage |
Normal for brand-new websites or sites with no link-building history. Very movable with focused effort. |
|
21- 40 |
Building authority |
Where most small to mid-sized businesses sit. Competitive in local markets, niche industries, and lower-competition keywords. |
|
41- 60 |
Established authority |
Well-maintained sites with consistent content and link-building over several years. Competitive across most mid-level keyword categories. |
|
61- 80 |
High authority |
Major industry publications, established national media outlets, and large enterprise websites. |
|
81- 100 |
Dominant authority |
Wikipedia, BBC, major government domains, and global news networks. Not a realistic target for most businesses. |
The most useful benchmark is always competitive rather than absolute. Pull the domain authority scores for the top five sites ranking for your most important keywords. That range is the threshold you are actually working against. If those sites sit between 35 and 50 and your domain is at 28, you have a clear, specific target. If your domain sits at 40 and those sites average 42, the gap is small enough that content quality and relevance are likely driving more of the difference than authority.
Your competitor’s score is the benchmark that matters. An industry average or a general guideline tells you nothing about the specific race you are in.
These three misconceptions show up in almost every domain authority conversation. Getting them straight saves real time and real money.
❌ Common belief: A higher domain authority means you will rank better.
✅ What is actually true: Domain authority measures your link profile. Google ranks pages on dozens of signals, including content relevance, search intent match, technical quality, and user behaviour. A high-DA site ranks poorly for keywords it has not addressed well. A lower-DA site can outrank it on keywords it has covered thoroughly and relevantly. The two things are connected but not the same.
❌ Common belief: If my domain authority dropped, my SEO got worse.
✅ What is actually true: Not necessarily. Moz recalibrates scores across the entire web every time it updates its index. A score drop during one of these updates reflects a shift in the benchmark, not always a change in your link profile. Before drawing conclusions from a score drop, check whether it coincides with a known Moz algorithm update. If it does, wait for the next reading before acting.
❌ Common belief: Getting more links quickly will improve my domain authority.
✅ What is actually true: Link quantity without quality can drag a score down or keep it flat. Links from spam sites, link farms, or irrelevant low-quality directories are treated as negative signals. And buying bulk links creates Google penalty risk that the domain authority score gives no warning of; your DA can look healthy while Google’s systems are already flagging the same links as manipulative.
Checking your domain authority takes under a minute and does not require a paid subscription for a basic result.
Moz offers a free domain authority checker at moz.com/domain-analysis. Enter any domain and get the DA score, the number of linking domains, and a list of the top sites linking to it. No account required. This is the quickest way to check your own score and run a fast comparison against a few competitors.
The Moz MozBar browser extension for Chrome is worth installing if you do regular competitive research. It displays domain authority and page authority scores directly inside Google search results as you browse, useful for assessing competitor authority during normal keyword research without switching tabs.
If your team uses Ahrefs, Semrush, or Majestic, each platform has its own authority score available inside Site Explorer or Domain Overview. Remember that each tool uses a different methodology and produces different numbers; always compare scores from the same tool to keep readings consistent and meaningful.
Domain authority is a score from 1 to 100 that measures the strength of your website’s external link profile, as calculated by Moz’s algorithm. It is not a Google metric. It does not directly determine your search rankings. And it is built entirely on backlinks, who links to you and how credible those sources are.
Whether your score is good depends on the specific site's ranking for your target keywords, not on any universal scale. Run a competitive check, find the DA range of the sites you are actually competing against, and use that as your benchmark.
If the gap is significant, link building is the lever. If the gap is small and you are still not ranking, the issue lies elsewhere; content quality, relevance, and technical factors are the more likely culprits.
For the full picture, how the score is used strategically, what it cannot tell you, and how it fits into a broader SEO approach, the pillar article in this series covers all of it in depth.
Q: Is a 20 domain authority good?
A Domain Authority (DA) score of 20 is considered relatively low but common for newer or smaller websites. Domain Authority is measured on a scale from 1 to 100, with higher scores indicating stronger search engine ranking potential. While 20 is a good starting point, websites typically aim to increase their DA over time through quality content, strong backlinks, and consistent SEO practices.
Q: What is an example of domain authority?
Domain Authority measures the overall strength of a website’s ability to rank in search engines. For example, large websites such as news outlets and major platforms often have Domain Authority scores above 80, while small blogs or new business websites may start at 10-30.
Q: What are DA and PA?
DA (Domain Authority) and PA (Page Authority) are SEO metrics that predict how well a website or a specific page may rank in search engine results. Domain Authority measures the strength of the entire website, while Page Authority evaluates the ranking potential of a single page within that site.
Q: How do you find out your domain authority?
You can check your Domain Authority using SEO tools such as Moz, Ahrefs, or SEMrush. These tools analyse factors like backlinks, linking domains, and site structure to estimate your website’s authority score. Many offer free versions that let you view basic metrics.