Domain Authority Is a Vanity Metric
Domain Authority and Domain Rating are made-up numbers created by tool companies. Google doesn't use them. They don't predict rankings. Stop optimizing for fiction.
"What's your Domain Authority?"
It's the first question every SEO client asks. It's on every agency pitch deck. It's the number everyone obsesses over.
And it's completely made up.
Domain Authority isn't a Google metric. It's not based on Google data. Google has explicitly said they don't use anything like it. It's a number invented by Moz in 2010 to sell subscriptions.
And the entire SEO industry treats it like gospel.
The Origin Story
In 2010, Moz needed a way to quantify "site strength." Google had killed public PageRank access, so there was a vacuum. Marketers wanted a number they could point to. Clients wanted a score they could understand.
So Moz created Domain Authority. A score from 1-100 based on their own link index and their own proprietary algorithm. Not Google's data. Not Google's algorithm. Their own invention.
Then Ahrefs created Domain Rating. Same concept, different formula, different number. Then Majestic created Trust Flow. Then Semrush created Authority Score.
Now we have five companies selling five different made-up numbers that all claim to measure the same thing. And none of them agree with each other.
Check any site in multiple tools. You'll get wildly different scores. Because they're all using different data and different calculations to arrive at fictional numbers.
Why It Doesn't Correlate With Rankings
If DA/DR actually predicted rankings, you'd expect high-DA sites to always outrank low-DA sites. They don't.
Search any competitive keyword. You'll find DA 30 sites outranking DA 70 sites. You'll find brand new sites outranking established ones. You'll find niche sites beating major publishers.
Because Google doesn't rank domains. They rank pages. A high-authority domain with thin content on a topic will lose to a low-authority domain with the definitive resource.
Moz and Ahrefs will tell you that DA/DR is "correlated" with rankings. Sure. Sites with lots of links tend to rank well, and DA/DR is based on links. But correlation isn't causation. It's not that high DA causes rankings. It's that the same things that cause rankings also happen to increase DA.
The metric is a lagging indicator dressed up as a predictive one.
The DA Manipulation Industry
Because people believe DA matters, an entire industry exists to manipulate it.
Link sellers price by DA. "DR 50+ sites only!" Guest post marketplaces sort by DA. Agencies report DA increases as wins. Clients demand DA improvements in contracts.
This creates perverse incentives. Agencies buy cheap links from high-DA sites to inflate client metrics. Site owners accept spammy guest posts because it "builds their DA." Everyone games a number that doesn't actually matter.
I've seen sites with DA 70+ that get zero organic traffic. I've seen sites with DA 15 that rank for thousands of keywords. The number tells you almost nothing about actual search performance.
What Google Actually Measures
Google doesn't have a "domain authority" score. They've said this repeatedly. What they do have:
PageRank (still exists, just not public): A page-level metric, not domain-level. And it's just one of hundreds of signals.
Link quality and relevance: Not quantity. Not a score. Contextual evaluation of whether a link makes sense.
Topical authority: How much quality content you have on a subject. Demonstrated expertise in an area.
User signals: Do people click your results? Do they stay? Do they come back?
Brand signals: Do people search for you by name? Do you have real-world recognition?
None of these are captured by a single number. Authority is contextual, topic-specific, and constantly changing. Reducing it to "DA 47" is absurd oversimplification.
Why The Industry Won't Let Go
DA/DR persist because they're useful for everyone except the people paying for SEO:
Useful for tool companies: It's a sticky metric. Once you start tracking DA, you need to keep your subscription to monitor it.
Useful for agencies: Easy to report. Easy to show improvement. "We increased your DA from 35 to 42!" Sounds impressive. Means nothing.
Useful for link sellers: Price discrimination. Charge more for links from "high DA" sites.
Useful for pitches: "We specialize in building high-authority links." Sounds more sophisticated than "we'll get you some links."
The metric serves the industry, not the client. It gives everyone something to point at while actual results may or may not happen.
What to Track Instead
If DA is useless, what should you actually measure?
Organic traffic: Are more people finding you through search? This is the actual goal.
Rankings for target keywords: Are you showing up for searches that matter to your business?
Conversions from organic: Is search traffic turning into customers?
Branded search volume: Are more people searching for you by name? This is real authority.
Share of voice: How visible are you compared to competitors for your target topics?
These are outcome metrics. They measure what actually matters. Not proxy scores invented by tool companies.
The Uncomfortable Conclusion
If you've been optimizing for DA, you've been optimizing for a number that exists only in third-party tools. You've been chasing a metric that Google doesn't use, that doesn't predict rankings, and that can be easily manipulated.
The time you spent building links "for DA" might have helped. Or it might not have. You'll never know, because DA wasn't the mechanism.
I'm not saying links don't matter. They do. I'm saying the scoring system we've invented around them is fictional. And treating fiction as fact leads to wasted effort and misallocated budgets.
Domain Authority is the SEO industry's security blanket. It gives us a number to track when the real metrics are too complex or too slow. But comfort isn't the same as accuracy.
Stop asking "what's our DA?" Start asking "are we ranking for things that matter?" That's the only score that counts.