What Is Domain Authority (DA)?
Domain Authority (DA) is a third-party metric created by Moz that scores a website from 1 to 100, estimating how likely it is to rank in search results based largely on its backlink profile. It is not a metric Google publishes, uses, or has ever confirmed as a ranking factor.
If Google doesn't use it, why does it matter?
DA and similar third-party scores (Ahrefs' Domain Rating, for example) are useful as a rough, comparative shorthand for how link-rich a site is relative to another. They're commonly used in outreach and partnership conversations as a quick trust signal, even though neither company involved in a link exchange can see the other's actual Google ranking factors.
Treat DA as a proxy for backlink strength, not a proxy for rankings. A site can carry a high DA score and still rank poorly if its content doesn't match what people search for, and a newer site with a modest DA can outrank it on the queries that matter.
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