Domain Authority, Domain Rating, what are they?

 We feel like we should mention and clarify these concepts. You’ve probably known or heard about the concept of Domain Authority, Domain Rating, or Authority score. They are metrics developed by popular SEO software providers:

• Domain Authority: developed by Moz. This is a score that predicts how well your website will rank on the search results pages.
• Domain Rating: developed by Ahref. This metric shows the relative strength of a website’s backlink profile.
• Authority score: developed by Semrush. This metric is used for measuring a domain’s or webpage’s overall quality and SEO performance.

Essentially, these metrics aim to quantify the quality of a website based on many factors. They all have one thing in common, which is the inclusion of a site’s backlink profile in calculating the score. For the Domain Rating metric by Ahref, the metric is purely link-based.

Let us clarify that none of these are ranking factors that Google uses. They are metrics specific to the software that uses them. While Google doesn’t use these metrics, you can still use them as a reference point in your SEO strategy. But don’t blindly rely on them as there may be flaws in how these metrics are developed or calculated.

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Camille Cunningham

Camille is content manager at Yoast. She writes and optimizes blog posts and enjoys creating content that helps people master SEO.