Domain Authority Is a Vanity Metric

"What's your Domain Authority?" is the first question every SEO client asks, the number that appears on every agency pitch deck, and the metric that everyone obsesses over as if it were handed down from Mount Sinai on stone tablets, when in fact it's completely made up.

Domain Authority isn't a Google metric, and it's not based on Google data, and Google has explicitly said, on multiple occasions, to anyone who would listen, that they don't use anything like it, because it's a number that was invented by Moz in 2010 to sell subscriptions, which is the kind of origin story that should give everyone pause but somehow doesn't.

And the entire SEO industry treats it like gospel.

The Origin Story

In 2010, Moz needed a way to quantify "site strength" because Google had killed public PageRank access and there was a vacuum, and marketers desperately wanted a number they could point to in reports, and clients wanted a score they could understand without having to learn anything about how search actually works, and so Moz created Domain Authority, a score from 1-100 based on their own link index and their own proprietary algorithm, which is to say not Google's data and not Google's algorithm but rather Moz's own invention that they then convinced everyone to treat as if it were real.

Then Ahrefs created Domain Rating using the same concept but a different formula that produces a different number, and then Majestic created Trust Flow, and then Semrush created Authority Score, and now we have five companies selling five different made-up numbers that all claim to measure the same thing while none of them agree with each other, which should be a red flag but instead just means people subscribe to multiple tools so they can pick whichever number makes them feel best.

Check any site in multiple tools and you'll get wildly different scores, because they're all using different data and different calculations to arrive at fictional numbers, which is like asking five fortune tellers to predict your future and then averaging their answers.

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, but search any competitive keyword and you'll find DA 30 sites outranking DA 70 sites, and brand new sites outranking established ones, and niche sites beating major publishers, which is the kind of observation that should have killed the metric's credibility years ago but somehow hasn't. (Want to know how to actually assess if you can rank? Here's the real process.)

This happens because Google doesn't rank domains - they rank pages - which means a high-authority domain with thin content on a topic will lose to a low-authority domain with the definitive resource, and no amount of DA points will change that fundamental reality.

Moz and Ahrefs will tell you that DA/DR is "correlated" with rankings, and sure, sites with lots of links tend to rank well, and DA/DR is based on links, but correlation isn't causation, and it's not that high DA causes rankings but rather that the same things that cause rankings also happen to increase DA, which makes the metric a lagging indicator dressed up as a predictive one, which is a neat trick if you're selling subscriptions.

The DA Manipulation Industry

Because people believe DA matters, an entire industry exists to manipulate it, and link sellers price by DA with demands like "DR 50+ sites only!", and guest post marketplaces sort by DA, and agencies report DA increases as wins, and clients demand DA improvements in contracts, which creates a beautiful closed loop of activity that has almost nothing to do with actual search performance.

This creates perverse incentives where agencies buy cheap links from high-DA sites to inflate client metrics, and site owners accept spammy guest posts because it "builds their DA," and everyone games a number that doesn't actually matter while congratulating themselves on their progress, which is the kind of collective delusion that would be funny if it weren't costing people real money.

I've seen sites with DA 70+ that get zero organic traffic, and I've seen sites with DA 15 that rank for thousands of keywords, which should tell you everything you need to know about how much this number actually reflects search reality, which is to say not much at all.

What Google Actually Measures

Google doesn't have a "domain authority" score, and they've said this repeatedly, though nobody seems to be listening, and what they do have instead is a collection of signals that resist easy quantification:

PageRank still exists, just not publicly, and it's a page-level metric rather than a domain-level one, and it's just one of hundreds of signals, which is a far cry from the single number everyone wishes existed.

Link quality and relevance matter, but not quantity, and not as a score, but rather as a contextual evaluation of whether a link makes sense in context, which is the kind of nuance that doesn't fit in a dashboard.

Topical authority matters, meaning how much quality content you have on a subject and whether you've demonstrated expertise in an area, which again cannot be reduced to a number.

User signals matter, like whether people click your results and whether they stay and whether they come back, none of which shows up in your DA score.

Brand signals matter, like whether people search for you by name and whether you have real-world recognition, which has nothing to do with link counts.

None of these are captured by a single number, because authority is contextual and topic-specific and constantly changing, and reducing it to "DA 47" is an absurd oversimplification that exists because oversimplifications are easier to sell.

Why The Industry Won't Let Go

DA/DR persist because they're useful for everyone except the people actually paying for SEO, which is a business model that describes a lot of the industry if you think about it too hard.

Useful for tool companies, because it's a sticky metric, and once you start tracking DA you need to keep your subscription to monitor it, which is recurring revenue built on a foundation of sand.

Useful for agencies, because it's easy to report and easy to show improvement, and saying "we increased your DA from 35 to 42!" sounds impressive even though it means nothing, which is ideal when you need to justify your retainer.

Useful for link sellers, because it enables price discrimination, and you can charge more for links from "high DA" sites regardless of whether those sites send any actual traffic or influence any actual rankings.

Useful for pitches, because "we specialize in building high-authority links" sounds more sophisticated than "we'll get you some links," even though the latter is more honest about what's actually happening.

The metric serves the industry rather than the client, giving everyone something to point at in reports while actual results may or may not be happening in the background, which is the kind of arrangement that works until someone starts asking uncomfortable questions.

What to Track Instead

If DA is useless, what should you actually measure? The answer, which will disappoint anyone looking for a single number to obsess over, is a collection of outcome metrics that measure what actually matters:

Organic traffic, meaning are more people finding you through search, which is the actual goal that somehow gets lost in conversations about domain scores.

Rankings for target keywords, meaning are you showing up for searches that matter to your business, not just searches that look impressive in a report.

Conversions from organic, meaning is search traffic turning into customers, because traffic that doesn't convert is just a vanity metric with extra steps.

Branded search volume, meaning are more people searching for you by name, which is what real authority looks like in practice.

Share of voice, meaning how visible are you compared to competitors for your target topics, which requires more work to measure but actually tells you something useful.

These are outcome metrics that measure what actually matters, as opposed to proxy scores invented by tool companies to give you something to track while you wait for the real results.

The Uncomfortable Conclusion

If you've been optimizing for DA, you've been optimizing for a number that exists only in third-party tools, chasing a metric that Google doesn't use and that doesn't predict rankings and that can be easily manipulated, which is a lot of effort to spend on something that was made up by a company trying to sell you software.

The time you spent building links "for DA" might have helped, or it might not have, and you'll never actually know because DA wasn't the mechanism that drove whatever results you got, which is the kind of uncertainty that should bother people more than it does.

I'm not saying links don't matter - they do - but I am saying that the scoring system we've invented around them is fictional, and treating fiction as fact leads to wasted effort and misallocated budgets, which is how we ended up with an entire industry optimizing for made-up numbers while wondering why their traffic isn't improving.

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.