Domain authority is a score from 1 to 100 that predicts how likely a website is to rank in search engine results pages compared to competitors. Moz, an SEO software company, created the metric.
Google doesn’t publish a website authority score or offer a domain authority checker, and some digital marketing companies have stepped in to fill the gap. Ahrefs and Semrush, for example, have their own metrics, called domain rating and authority score.
This guide focuses on domain authority, including how to check yours, and how to increase it.
What is domain authority?
Domain authority is a search engine ranking score developed by Moz that predicts how likely a website is to rank in search engine results pages. Scores range from 1 to 100, with higher scores corresponding to a greater ability to rank.
Russ Jones, former principal search scientist at Moz, told Search Engine Land in 2019 that domain authority “is just one metric to illustrate a website’s search performance” and that problems arise when site owners focus on one metric alone. He added that marketers should be monitoring and measuring against all kinds of factors, like keyword opportunities and clickthrough rates.
What is a good domain authority score?
There’s no universal good domain authority score. A good score is relative to the scores of competing websites. Russ said in 2019 that domain authority is a comparative metric that cannot stand on its own.
“Domain authority is meaningless when it isn’t compared to other sites, full stop,” he said. “What matters isn’t whether your site drops or increases. It’s whether it drops or increases relative to your competitors.”
Ahrefs says its own domain rating metric can’t be judged as good or bad in absolute terms and is good when it’s higher than or comparable to the scores of similar sites. An analysis published by the company in June 2026, for example, found the top 10 organic results for “best running shoes” had an average domain rating of 76, and the lowest score among them was 29.
To make a comparison, let’s say for a dog food store, take the following steps:
- List the dog food stores that sell to the same customers
- Look up each store’s score in the same tool
- Compare the store’s score with each competitor’s score
- Repeat the comparison later to see how the store’s score changed relative to others
In a hypothetical comparison, a dog food store has a domain authority score of 20, and five competitors have scores of 12, 18, 24, 30, and 35. The store’s score is higher than two of those scores and lower than three, and the highest competitor score is 15 points above it. If the store’s score rises to 26 while the highest competitor score stays at 35, the gap narrows to 9 points.
How domain authority is calculated
Moz says Domain Authority is calculated using a machine learning algorithm that evaluates dozens of factors, and primarily relies on data from its backlink checking tool, Link Explorer. Backlinks are inbound links from other websites to a site.
The company notes that as search engines and websites evolve, Domain Authority scores may change.
Backlinks: the dominant input
Moz says factors such as linking root domains, the quality of those links, and other signals that correlate with rankings are included in its calculations.
A linking root domain is a unique root domain that links to a site, also called a referring domain. So sites with a diverse and high-quality set of backlinks will typically have a higher domain authority score than those with fewer or lower-quality links.
Domain authority vs. page authority: What’s the difference?
Domain authority is a Moz score for an entire website, while page authority is a Moz score for an individual page. They’re both calculated the same way and given a score of 1 to 100, except page authority is limited to one page.
Both scores are best used as relative metrics, not absolute ones, to compare ranking potential against competitors in search results.
How to check your domain authority for free
Domain authority is Moz’s score, and other vendors publish separate scores that aren’t domain authority. Each of these tools reports a different proprietary metric:
- Moz Link Explorer. Reports Moz’s domain authority and page authority. Moz offers up to 10 free queries per month.
- Ahrefs Website Authority Checker. Reports Ahrefs’ domain rating, which Ahrefs says looks at the quantity and quality of external backlinks and doesn’t factor in link spam, traffic, or domain age. Ahrefs offers the checker for free.
- Semrush Website Authority Checker. Reports Semrush’s authority score, which the company says combines backlink data, organic search traffic, and spam signals. The checker needs no login or account.
- Majestic Site Explorer. Reports Majestics Trust Flow, which scores a website’s backlink quality, and Citation Flow, which Majestic says is driven by link quantity. Majestic offers a free sign-up and a free browser plug-in.
Scores may differ across tools due to different formulas, so use the same tool when comparing against competitors.
How to check your domain authority, page authority, and spam score
Moz reports all three scores for a domain in Link Explorer. To check them:
- Open Moz Link Explorer.
- Enter the domain in the search bar.
- Run the analysis.
- Read the domain authority, page authority, and spam score in the results.
Each score answers a different question:
- Domain authority. Predicts how well a site will rank in search engine results compared to competitors.
- Page authority. Predicts how well a specific page will rank in search engine results compared to competitors.
- Spam score. A separate proprietary Moz metric. It represents the percentage of sites with similar features that were found to be penalized or banned by Google.
Spam score describes the domain being checked, not the sites that link to it. Moz says the score isn’t a measure of being spammy, but a high score may warrant a quality checkup.
How to increase your domain authority
Domain authority can change as search engines and sites evolve. The steps below cover auditing a site’s backlink profile, creating content, building backlinks, promoting the site on social media, and optimizing on-page SEO, as part of a broader SEO strategy.
Each step gives an action to take and where to take it:
- Conduct a domain authority audit
- Remove toxic and purchased backlinks
- Create great content
- Build high-quality backlinks
- Add internal links
- Optimize on-page SEO
1. Conduct a domain authority audit
A domain authority audit from any tool compares a site’s backlink profile with the profiles of the sites it competes against. The audit has four parts:
- Record the site’s current score with one of the tools
- Review the sites that link to the site
- List the sites that rank for the store’s target keywords
- Review those sites’ backlinks and compare them with the store’s own
Semrush says to run a domain through its Website Authority Checker, check the Authority Scores of the linking domains, and flag low-authority or suspicious links for a closer look.
Ahrefs says to compare a site’s Domain Rating with the sites already ranking for a target keyword, and says that when competitors’ scores are higher, analyzing their backlink profiles can show untapped link opportunities. Keyword research shows which sites rank for a keyword.
2. Remove toxic and purchased backlinks
Google’s spam policies define link spam as creating links to or from a site primarily to manipulate search rankings, and they list buying or selling links for ranking purposes as an example. Google says paid links don’t violate the policies when they’re qualified with a rel=“nofollow” or rel=“sponsored” attribute.
Sites that violate the policies may rank lower or not appear in Google results, and Google can apply a manual action after human review.
To review and remove paid or spammy backlinks:
- Review the site’s backlinks in the Google Search Console links report
- Ask each linking site to remove links that violate Google’s spam policies
- Disavow the links that remain if the site has a manual action or is likely to get one
Google says most sites don’t need its disavow tool and that incorrect use can harm a site’s performance in Google Search. Google advises disavowing only when a site has a considerable number of spammy, artificial, or low-quality links and those links have caused, or are likely to cause, a manual action.
To disavow, save a text file with one URL or domain per line, prefix each domain with “domain:”, and upload the file on the disavow links tool page. The tool doesn’t support Domain properties, and a list can take a few weeks to take effect.
3. Create great content
Find content topics by reviewing the pages already performing well on the store’s site and on competitors’ sites. Use the results to identify what the store’s audience is searching for, and create solid SEO content on those topics.
A Shopify online store comes with a built-in blogging engine. Every store starts with a default blog called News, which can be renamed or supplemented with additional blogs.
4. Build high-quality backlinks
Here are ways a store can pursue backlinks consistent with Google’s spam policies:
- Publish content that other sites reference and link to on their own.
- Write guest content for other sites without payment or product exchange for the links, or qualify any paid or exchanged links with rel=“nofollow” or rel=“sponsored”
- Ask sites that already mention the store to add a link
5. Add internal links
Google’s link best practices say every page a site owner cares about should have a link from at least one other page on the same site, and that internal links help both readers and Google make sense of a site and find other pages on it.
To add internal links:
- Identify pages that would help a reader understand the page being edited
- Add a link to each one within the body content, in context
- Write anchor text that’s specific enough to make sense on its own, rather than “click here” or “read more”
- Space links out rather than placing several next to each other
Google gives no fixed number of links for a page and says that if a link count feels like too many, it probably is.
6. Optimize on-page SEO
A Shopify online store handles several technical SEO elements automatically. Shopify can auto-generate canonical tags to prevent duplicate content in search results, sitemap.xml and robots.txt files, and title tags that include the store name. Shopify themes are required to have social sharing options, and SSL certificates are activated by default.
Store owners can also edit the title tags, meta descriptions, and URLs for blog posts, pages, products, and collections, and edit image alt text.
Shopify’s web performance reports show a store’s Core Web Vitals:
- Largest Contentful Paint measures loading speed
- Interaction to Next Paint measures interactivity
- Cumulative Layout Shift measures visual stability
Each metric gets a ranking of Good, Moderate, or Poor, based on the past 30 days of visitor data. The reports break down each metric over time, by page URL, and by page type, so a store owner can find which pages or changes affected a score.
Domain authority FAQ
How do I find out my domain authority?
Enter a domain into Moz’s Link Explorer to find its domain authority score. Other digital marketing companies have their own website authority tools, like Ahrefs’s Website Authority Checker, Semrush’s Website Authority Checker, and Majestic’s Site Explorer.
Each tool reports its own proprietary score rather than a single universal number, so scores for the same domain vary by tool. Google doesn’t publish an authority score, so no checker comes from Google itself.
Why did my domain authority go down?
A domain authority score can change when the links pointing to a site change, since Moz calculates the score by combining its link metrics, including linking root domains and total links, into one number. Moz may also update its domain authority model over time, which can shift scores across the web even without a change to a specific site’s own links.
How often does Moz update domain authority?
Moz hasn’t published a fixed update schedule for domain authority. Moz has previously said it can update domain authority relative to the changes Google makes. A score can also change between model updates as the backlinks pointing to a site change.
Can domain authority transfer to a new domain name or website?
Domain authority doesn’t transfer automatically. Google’s documentation on redirects says a 301 or 308 redirect signals that a page has permanently moved, and Google’s indexing pipeline treats a permanent redirect as a strong signal that the new URL should be canonical.
Since Moz calculates domain authority from a site’s backlinks, redirecting old URLs to their new equivalents keeps those backlinks pointing at content Google associates with the new domain.
Does domain authority matter for AI search?
Google says there are no additional technical requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode beyond a page being indexed and eligible to appear in regular Google Search results with a snippet. Google’s own documentation doesn’t mention domain authority, since it isn’t a Google metric.
