Gabriel Espinheira
Domain authority is not a Google ranking factor. It never has been.
That one sentence quietly deletes a slide from a lot of monthly SEO decks — the slide where a number climbs from 28 to 34, a green arrow points up, and nobody in the room can tell you what changed in the inbox. If you have ever paid for "link building to raise your domain authority" and wondered why the enquiries never followed the number, here is the reason. You were watching a score Google never reads.
Domain authority is not Google's metric. It belongs to Moz, an SEO software company, and it runs on a 1-to-100 scale that Moz built to predict ranking. Ahrefs sells its own version called Domain Rating. Both are estimates of your backlink profile, calculated by a private vendor — not a signal the search engine consults when it decides where you land. Moz states it plainly in its own documentation: Domain Authority "is not a Google ranking factor." When the company that sells you the number tells you Google ignores it, that is worth reading twice.
The short version: Domain authority (and Ahrefs' Domain Rating) is a third-party guess at how strong your backlinks are. Google does not use it. The 2024 Google documentation leak showed the search engine keeps its own site-level trust signal — but it is earned by being worth citing, not bought by moving a vendor's needle. Measure enquiries and real mentions, not DA.
Where the number in your report actually comes from
Someone built the domain authority in your report by reverse-engineering Google, not by reading anything Google publishes. Moz crawls the web, counts linking root domains and total links, runs a machine-learning model, and outputs a tidy score. Ahrefs does the same and calls it something else. Useful as a rough gauge. Fine as a proxy. But a proxy is the map, not the ground.
Here is where it goes wrong. The report treats the proxy as the target. "Let's get you to DA 40" becomes the goal, so the work becomes acquiring whatever Moz counts — links — regardless of whether those links do anything for a buyer or for Google. You end up paying to improve a private company's estimate of your website. That is not a ranking strategy. That is optimising the reflection.
Google has said the same thing for a decade
This is not a contrarian take. It is the boring official record, repeated until the people saying it sounded tired.
Gary Illyes, from Google's search team, said back in 2016: "We don't really have 'overall domain authority'." John Mueller, also Google, was blunter in 2020 — Google does not use domain authority "at all in our algorithms" — and said it again in 2022. Not "we weight it lightly." Not "it's one of two hundred factors." At all.
You can dislike the messenger. But there is no version of the last ten years where Google quietly used a Moz number and forgot to mention it across dozens of public answers. The score in your deck and the algorithm ranking your pages have never been the same thing.
The 2024 leak didn't rescue domain authority — it buried it
In May 2024, roughly 14,000 internal Google Search documents — 2,596 modules — spilled onto GitHub and were surfaced by Rand Fishkin and Mike King. For about a week, every SEO forum declared victory: one of the leaked fields was called siteAuthority. See — Google does have domain authority.
Read the actual documents and the story flips. Yes, Google appears to keep a site-wide trust signal. That is real, and it matters. But siteAuthority is Google's own internal measure, computed from signals Google has never handed anyone a dial for. It is not Moz's DA, it is not your report's number, and there is no field in there labelled "buy links, watch it rise."
There was, however, another field in the same leak: BadBackLinks. Sit with that. The exact link packages an agency sells to lift your domain authority are the kind of pattern Google has a named signal for on the negative side. Google's spam systems devalue manipulative links algorithmically now — most sites never need the disavow tool at all. So the vendor's number and Google's real signal can move in opposite directions at the same time. You can buy your way to a higher DA and a quieter site.
Why the score still climbs alongside your rankings
Two things can climb together without either one lifting the other. That is exactly what happens with domain authority and your rankings — both are driven by the same underlying cause, and neither one causes the other.
When you publish something genuinely worth referencing, real sites link to it and real readers cite it. Google notices the usefulness. Moz notices the links. Rankings move; DA moves; they move together because the actual work moved both. The number is a lagging mirror of value you already created. Agencies sell you that mirror as if it were a lever — as if painting a higher number onto the glass would change what stares back. It doesn't. Domain authority is a mirror. Your agency sells it as a lever.
This is the same trap as the report "full of jargon, green arrows, and charts that don't really mean anything" that every burned founder eventually describes. A metric that only ever goes up, disconnected from the thing you sell, is not evidence. It is decoration with a decimal point.
What to measure instead of domain authority
Swap the vendor's number for three figures that touch the business.
Qualified enquiries. Did a real, right-fit person fill the form, book the call, or send the email? This is the only number that survives a recession. "We've done SEO… why aren't we showing up?" is a fair complaint — but showing up is a means, and enquiries are the end. Track the end.
Real mentions and citations. Are relevant publications, suppliers, and now AI answers referencing you by name? When ChatGPT or Google's AI answers name you as an option, that is site trust doing its job — the thing siteAuthority gestures at, earned honestly. One editorial citation from a source your buyer already reads outweighs fifty directory links.
Rankings on queries that precede a sale. Impressions and positions on the searches a buyer runs the week before they choose someone — not vanity head terms with no intent behind them.
Links still matter, to be clear. But the links that matter are earned: a real site references you because you said something worth referencing. That is the only kind that lifts Google's real signal and your DA at once — and it is the opposite of a bought package. Everything else marketed as "link building" is theatre with an invoice. This blog is the working example. Every post here is written to be worth citing, because that is the only durable way any authority signal, Google's or Moz's, actually moves.
When domain authority is still worth a glance
Not never. Domain authority is a fine rough gauge when you are sizing up a market or a prospect — a five-second read on whether a competitor has been around and earning links, or a quick triage before deeper work. Glance at it the way you glance at a thermometer.
What it is not: a goal, a service line, or a line on your own progress report. The moment "raise your DA" becomes something you are paying for, you are buying the thermometer instead of turning on the heat.
FAQ
Is domain authority a Google ranking factor?
No. Domain authority is a 1-to-100 score created by Moz, a third-party SEO tool, to predict ranking. Google representatives have said for years that Google does not use it. Moz's own documentation confirms it is not a Google ranking factor.
What is a good domain authority score?
There is no universal good score, because it is relative to your competitors and controlled by a private vendor, not Google. A DA that is higher than the sites you compete against tells you something rough about link profiles. It tells you nothing certain about where you will rank or how many enquiries you will get.
Does the 2024 Google leak mean Google uses domain authority after all?
No. The May 2024 leak revealed Google keeps its own internal siteAuthority signal — but that is Google's private measure, not Moz's DA, and Google has never exposed a way to buy or set it. The same leak also named a BadBackLinks signal, which is bad news for anyone purchasing links to raise a score.
Should I pay for link building to raise my domain authority?
Not as a goal in itself. Paid link packages target the vendor's number, not Google's, and can trip the exact spam patterns Google devalues. Earned references from relevant, credible sites are worth pursuing; a monthly invoice to lift a DA figure usually is not.
The number was never the point
A score that always climbs and never explains itself is the easiest thing in the world to sell and the least useful thing to own. Domain authority is a mirror of work you either did or didn't do. Stop paying to repaint the glass.
If your last SEO report leaned on a domain authority number, send it over. I'll tell you which figures on it map to enquiries and which are there to fill a slide. That is how we run everything at SharpHaw — one senior partner, weekly shipping, and a shared workspace in SharpOS where you can see what actually changed, not a number that only points up. Book a fit call through the contact page; the plans are priced in public.
