What is domain authority and should you care about it?

Domain Authority is a third-party metric

Moz’s Domain Authority estimates a website’s relative ranking potential using its own model. It is not a score supplied by Google and is not itself a Google ranking signal. Other tools have similarly named metrics with different calculations, so they should not be treated as interchangeable.

Source: Moz’s explanation of authority scoring.

Use it to ask questions, not set a business target

A relative score can be a starting point when comparing websites in the same tool. It cannot tell you whether a specific service page answers a search well, whether the business is nearby or whether visitors become customers.

A small local specialist can be relevant to a search even when a large unrelated website has a higher authority score.

Do not buy links simply to raise the number

A package promising a score increase may optimise the provider’s metric rather than your business. Ask where links would come from, why the audience would find them useful and whether the arrangement follows search policies. Manipulative link schemes can create risk without improving customer discovery.

Start with a competitor page comparison before assuming an authority gap explains the rankings.

What to measure instead

• Relevant queries and the pages appearing for them.
• Clicks from searches connected to your actual services.
• Suitable enquiries and the work they produce.
• Completed improvements and evidence that the affected pages work.

When a changing score deserves attention

If a tool reports a sudden change, inspect the underlying data and whether its model changed. Compare that with first-party search performance. A score movement without a corresponding business or search change is not automatically an SEO emergency.

Sitewell’s search analysis focuses on opportunities connected to actual pages and commercial priorities.

Read about rank tracking for a more specific way to monitor selected searches.