What is a good domain authority score?

A single number for how well the rest of the web links to a site, made by an SEO tool from its own index of links. Moz’s Domain Authority, on a scale of 1 to 100, gave the idea its name. The others:

• Domain Rating (Ahrefs). “The relative strength of a website’s backlink profile”, from 0 to 100 on a logarithmic scale, worked out in a way Ahrefs calls somewhat similar to PageRank, between websites rather than pages. Only followed links count, and only the first link from each domain (Ahrefs).
• Authority Score (Semrush). From 1 to 100, and not links alone: it combines link power, estimated organic traffic and signs of spam in the link profile (Semrush).
• Link Authority (ours). From 0 to 100, from Common Crawl’s open link graph of 134,979,706 domains: PageRank on the links between domains, on a published formula, so anyone can check a score. Check a site.

Because each comes from a different index and a different formula, the same site gets a different number from each. A score is comparable only with scores from the same tool.

No. Asked about it in 2020, Google’s John Mueller said “We don’t use domain authority at all in our algorithms”, while confirming that Google still uses PageRank internally, among many other signals (Search Engine Roundtable). In 2022 he added that Google doesn’t count links at the domain level (Search Engine Roundtable). The scores are each tool’s summary of links, useful for comparing sites, not something Google reads.

One that holds up against the sites you compete with. Look up the domains that rank for the searches you want, with the same tool, and put yours beside them. If they sit far above you, links are likely part of the gap; if they are close, the pages themselves decide more of it.

For scale, this is how Link Authority spreads over all 134,979,706 domains in the graph: 47% of them score 0, and one in a hundred reaches 36.

A score of 10 already puts a site in the top 17% of domains. Scores of 70 and above belong to about 4,503 domains, the best linked on the web.

• Links from other domains, above all well-linked ones. Domain Rating, Authority Score and Link Authority all count a link for more when the site making it is itself well linked.
• More domains, not more links from the same one. Ahrefs counts only the first link from a domain, and our graph records whether one domain links to another, not how often. A thousand links from one site are one site.
• Something worth linking to. Ahrefs’ own advice is that the score grows as a byproduct of good content and good links. Original data, tools and guides that answer a question others cite are what earn them.
• Not bought links. Buying or selling links for ranking is link spam in Google’s spam policies (Google). Ahrefs notes that large numbers of low-quality links can raise a score anyway, which is one more reason not to treat the score as the goal.

The free domain authority checker gives any site’s Link Authority and its place among the 134,979,706 domains, with no account. To see what holds a site back besides links, the Trakis audit reads it the way a search engine’s crawler does.