Domain authority might be the most chased number in SEO that Google simply does not care about. Website owners pay for link packages, switch agencies, and obsess over DA going up, all betting it will push their rankings higher. It will not.
Google does not use domain authority. Never has. The people who actually build Google’s search algorithm have said so, directly, multiple times. And yet the myth keeps going.
What Domain Authority Actually Is
Domain authority (DA) is a score Moz built to estimate how competitive a website might be in search engine ranking pages. The scale goes from 1 to 100. Other tools have built their own versions: Ahrefs calls it Domain Rating, SEMrush calls it Authority Score. Same idea, different formula.
That last part matters more than people realize. Run the same domain through Moz and Ahrefs and you might get a DA of 38 on one and a DR of 55 on the other. Both tools have reasons for their numbers. The scores are different. The methodologies are different. And critically, Google is not involved in either of them.
Why Google Does Not Use Domain Authority
There is no ambiguity here. In 2022, John Mueller from Google answered someone on Reddit who had a DA of 31 and wanted to know what to do about it. His answer:
“Google doesn’t use it at all. If you’d like to level your site up in search, you’d need to focus on something else.”
Gary Illyes said something similar back in 2016, noting that he could not think of anything in Google’s ranking that would even translate to the idea of domain authority. Mueller said the same in 2019. These are not isolated comments. This is a consistent position held over nearly a decade by the same people who build the algorithm.
Where people get tripped up is the correlation. High-domain authority sites do tend to rank well. But that is because they have been doing real SEO for years, earning legitimate backlinks, publishing quality content, building topical depth. The DA score is a byproduct of that work, not the cause of their rankings.
What Google Actually Evaluates
Google does not hand out a single score for a website’s worth. Instead, it looks at a combination of signals, some at the page level and some across the whole domain, to figure out what deserves to rank and where.
Backlink Profile Quality
Backlinks still matter to Google, a lot. But it is not about how many you have. A handful of links from genuinely relevant sites will do more than 50 links from random directories. Google reads your backlink profile on its own terms, not through any DA score a tool assigns you.
Topical Authority
Sites that own a subject tend to rank across it. If your site has 20 articles that go deep on one topic and link to each other properly, you will usually beat a bigger site that only touched the subject once. Depth and consistency are what build real SEO performance over time.
E-E-A-T
Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness. Google trains human raters to assess content against these standards and builds its algorithm to mirror those judgments. Writing from real experience, being accurate, and making it clear who is behind the content all feed into website trustworthiness in ways a DA score simply cannot capture.
Page-Level Signals
Google does not just look at your domain as a whole. Individual pages get assessed on their own. A well-targeted page with solid links pointing to it can rank above a page from a high-DA domain if the page authority and content match are stronger. Domain reputation helps, but it does not override page-level signals.
Should You Track Domain Authority at All?
The score still has value when used correctly. Domain authority metrics are genuinely useful as competitive benchmarking tools.
| Use Case | Practical Application |
| Competitive research | Gauge relative link strength of competing sites in your niche |
| Link prospecting | Filter out low-quality sites when evaluating backlink opportunities |
| Internal progress tracking | Monitor whether your link profile is growing over time |
The trap is making domain authority a goal in itself. Paying for links just to push the number up, or choosing an agency based on promises to raise your DA, does nothing for your actual position in Google. The search engine does not see that score.
How to Build Authority Google Recognizes
Real domain authority, the kind Google responds to, comes from doing the fundamentals consistently, not from chasing a number in a tool. Link building quality, content depth, and actual user experience are what separate sites that rank from sites that wonder why they do not.
✓ Create things worth linking to: research, tools, guides that people actually reference
✓ Group related content into clusters and link the pieces together deliberately
✓ Use clear site structure to help Google discover and understand your content
✓ Demonstrate genuine expertise through specific detail, experience, and accurate sourcing
✗ Avoid chasing domain authority scores without understanding what actually drives them
✗ Do not pay for links from high-DA sites that have no relevance to your topic area
At Mostdomain, the focus is always on what Google’s algorithm actually rewards. A domain that earns trust does so through clean link acquisition, topical depth, and content that genuinely answers what people are searching for. The domain authority score, when managed this way, improves as a natural byproduct.
Stop Chasing the Number, Start Building What Matters
Domain authority is a useful tool for competitive analysis, but it is a third-party metric, not a Google signal. Google’s own team has been clear about this for years. Climbing search engine ranking pages comes from earning quality backlinks, building topical relevance, and creating content that truly serves the reader.
The number is not the goal. The goal is the ranking. Focus on what creates it.
FAQ
Does Google use Domain Authority to rank websites?
Nope. DA belongs to Moz, not Google. People inside Google have pushed back on this for years. Mueller mentioned in 2022 that he had never once pulled up a site’s DA score in his entire time working there. Fourteen years. Never checked it once.
Why do high-DA sites tend to rank well then?
Mostly because they have been around and putting in the work. Years of content, years of link acquisition, years of fixing technical issues. The DA climbed as a result of all that effort. It did not cause the rankings. It just reflected them.
What does Google use instead of Domain Authority?
No single score, honestly. Think about backlinks: are they from relevant sites or random ones? Think about how deep your content goes on a topic. Think about whether your pages actually load fast. Google is weighing a lot of things at once. There is no tidy equivalent to a DA number.
Is it still worth tracking Domain Authority?
For competitive research, sure. Say your competitors are all sitting above DA 60 and you are at 20, that gap tells you something real about where your link building effort needs to go. Just keep it in perspective. Chasing a specific DA score is not a strategy. It is a distraction.
Can a low-DA site outrank a high-DA site?
It happens more than people think. A newer site with one really solid, well-targeted page can beat a big domain that threw something together years ago and never touched it. Google wants the page that actually answers the question. Domain size does not guarantee that.
How long does it take to improve Domain Authority?
Moz updates scores once a month, but actual progress is slow. Six months of real work might shift things a few points. A year of serious effort, more. Sites coming from very low scores sometimes jump quicker at first, then it gets harder. There is no shortcut that actually holds.
References
- Mueller, J. (2022). Reddit AMA response on Domain Authority. Google Search Central Community.
- Illyes, G. (2016). Twitter response on domain authority ranking signals. Google.
- Moz. (2024). Domain Authority: What It Is and How It’s Calculated. Moz.com.
- Ahrefs. (2024). Domain Rating methodology overview. Ahrefs.com.
- SEMrush. (2024). Authority Score: How It Is Calculated. SEMrush.com.
- Search Engine Journal. (2023). Domain Authority: Is It a Google Ranking Factor? searchenginejournal.com.
