Domain Authority

Domain authority, also called site authority, is a measurement that represents how much authority a domain has to help in search engine ranking. This score and how it is calculated will vary between SEO tools and platforms, but generally it is a numerical score between 1 and 100 that is derived using website metrics that include the age of the domain, popularity by backlinks, size of the website and many other trust and SEO factors.

From PageRank to Domain Authority

The first authority score was Google’s PageRank (first released in 2000). PageRank was the industry standard used to measure the authority of a domain or website on a 10-point scale. The better the ranking, the more you would see the website rank on the first page of search results. Browser tools could be used to display a PageRank when viewing a website. By 2014, Google stopped updating PageRank tools and it was removed from web browsers. While PageRank is still used by the Google search engine, new and updated scores are not made available to the public, leaving SEO experts and web content producers and marketers to rely on third-party SEO tools to measure authority.

Moz Domain Authority (DA) Scores

Since PageRank has been removed from public eye, many SEO tools have created new tools and ways to calculate domain authority. One of the more well known implementations is the Moz version, which claims to use more than 40 metrics to calculate its Domain Authority (DA) score.

Vangie Beal
Vangie Beal
Vangie Beal is a freelance business and technology writer covering Internet technologies and online business since the late '90s.

Related Articles

@ Sign

Pronounced at sign or simply as at, this symbol is used in e-mail addressing to separate the user' name from the user's domain name,...

Munging

(MUHN-jing) Munging (address munging), is the act of altering an email address posted on a Web page to make it unreadable to bots and...

How to Create an RSS Feed

In the second installment of RSS how-to, we look at some of the nonrequired (optional) channel and item tags, discuss RSS specifications in-depth and...

Dictionary Attack

(n.) (1) A method used to break security systems, specifically password-based security systems, in which the attacker systematically tests all possible passwords beginning with...

ScalaHosting

ScalaHosting is a leading managed hosting provider that offers secure, scalable, and affordable...

HRIS

Human resources information system (HRIS) solutions help businesses manage multiple facets of their...

Best Managed Service Providers...

In today's business world, managed services are more critical than ever. They can...