Domain Authority (DA) and Domain Rating (DR)

Domain Authority (DA) and Domain Rating (DR) are proprietary scores from two SEO tools, Moz and Ahrefs respectively, that estimate how strong a website's backlink profile is on a scale from 0 to 100. Neither is a Google metric, and neither directly determines how a page ranks in search results.

DA and DR: two tools, one underlying idea

Moz created Domain Authority to help SEO professionals estimate how competitive a website is, based primarily on the quality and quantity of external domains linking to it. Ahrefs built its own version, Domain Rating, using a similar logic: the stronger a site's backlink profile relative to all other sites in the Ahrefs index, the higher the score. Semrush offers a comparable number under the name Authority Score. The label changes by tool; the core question stays the same: how many quality external domains link here, and how authoritative are those domains?

Both DA and DR use a logarithmic scale. According to Moz's documentation, a site's score becomes progressively harder to raise as it approaches 100, because the gap between each point represents a larger step in link strength (Moz, "Domain Authority," 2024). A site moving from a score of 20 to 30 needs far fewer quality links than a site moving from 70 to 80. That asymmetry matters when you read a competitor's score in a report: a five-point gap near the top represents more link equity than a ten-point gap near the bottom.

What DA and DR do not measure

This is where many SEO reports mislead by omission.

DA and DR are not Google signals. Google has its own link-evaluation systems, which it does not disclose publicly. As Moz states in its own documentation: Domain Authority is "not a metric used by Google in determining search rankings" (Moz, "Domain Authority," 2024). A site with a DA of 60 does not rank because of that number. A site with a DA of 20 can rank well for queries where its content is strong and its competing pages are weak.

Domain Authority covers the whole domain. Page Authority (PA), also a Moz metric, applies the same methodology to a single URL. When you are assessing whether a specific article on a site will pass link value, PA is the more precise signal than DA. Both share a scale, but they answer different questions.

DA and DR can also diverge significantly for the same site, because the two tools use different crawl indexes and weighting models. A site may show a DA of 35 and a DR of 55, or the reverse. Neither score is more correct; each reflects what that tool has indexed. Treating one as a check on the other tells you mainly that the tools differ, not that one site is stronger than another.

Example: evaluating a link-building outreach offer

Example: A marketing team receives a guest post proposal from a website with a DA of 48. Before accepting, they run three checks. First, they confirm the site's content is topically related to their own industry. Second, they estimate the site's organic traffic using a third-party tool, to verify the score reflects an active site rather than one that accumulated links historically and now receives no visitors. Third, they look at the Page Authority of the specific page where the article would appear, because a high domain score says little about an individual page with no inbound links of its own.

A high DA on a topically unrelated site with no organic traffic is a poor predictor of SEO impact. Used to compare multiple link prospects within the same niche, DA and DR are useful first filters.

Why this matters for your work

When you read an SEO report or review a link-building proposal, DA and DR give you a quick orientation: is this site's backlink profile stronger or weaker than yours? That comparison is the main job these metrics do well.

The risk is treating a single score as a ranking guarantee. Experienced SEO practitioners use DA and DR as one input alongside topical relevance, organic traffic, and the quality of the specific linking page. Understanding how link equity distributes across a site helps you interpret what a given score actually implies for a potential link. For the outreach and content work that builds a backlink profile over time, the principles of link building provide the practical framework for improving these scores in a sustainable way.