What is domain authority and how does it impact SEO?

Domain Authority (DA) is a metric that can help you predict how well a website will rank in search engine result pages (SERPs), measured on a scale from 1 to 100, with higher scores indicating stronger ranking potential.

Domain authority was created by Moz as a metric to help SEO professionals understand a website’s overall strength and competitiveness in search results. While it’s not an official Google ranking factor, it correlates strongly with actual search performance.

Here’s how domain authority impacts SEO:

• Websites with stronger domain authority scores typically rank better for competitive keywords
• Websites with higher authority find it easier to earn quality backlinks, as they get more exposure through search engines
• Search engines may crawl and index pages from high-authority domains more frequently and thoroughly than those from lower-authority sites
• Sites with strong domain authority may recover more quickly from the negative impacts of algorithm updates

At Semrush, we have a similar metric called “Authority Score (AS)” that can also help you predict how well your domain can rank in search engines.

You can find this metric inside our Domain Overview tool, Organic Research, Backlink Analytics, and some other SEO-related tools and reports.