How to Increase Domain Authority: 6 Actionable Tactics

With over 50% of articles on the internet right now being AI generated, and with so many websites being fake (1.8 million fake sites were detected by the end of 2024), having a high domain rating is only becoming more important.

But what exactly is Domain Authority? Domain Authority is a proprietary metric developed by Moz that rates a website out of 100, assessing the likelihood that your website ranks on the SERP. In short, the higher the likelihood that you’ll rank, the higher your score will be.

Moz calculates a website’s domain authority using a “machine learning algorithm” that prioritizes backlinks. Specifically, Moz takes into account “the number of linking root domains, the quality of those links, and other signals that correlate with rankings across thousands of search results.”

Domain Authority isn’t a direct Google ranking factor, although Google has hinted that they use a DA-like metric. That doesn’t mean Domain Authority isn’t important; Ahrefs found that Domain Rating (the Ahrefs version of DA) is positively correlated with keyword rankings.

This could possibly be attributed to the fact that people are naturally attracted to websites with a higher domain ranking (and user engagement signals do influence rankings), as people may perceive sites with a higher domain authority to be more trustworthy.

We’re also going to argue that Domain Authority (indirectly) has an impact on AI visibility. If you have a high DA, the implication is that many authoritative sources are linking to you, and research has found credibility and trustworthiness is the third most important factor for generative AI answers.

So, with all this talk about DA and how it impacts your SEO (and AEO), we’re gonna outline some strategies you can use to increase it. But before we do that, let’s talk about DA in the context of AI.

Understanding Domain Authority in the Age of AI

Let’s clear things up; when we discuss how DA is calculated with “the number of linking root domains,” it means that for every time a website like washingtonpost.com uses one of your links in an article, it’s only counted once. However, the number of times that they link to your website still matters. After all, do you think Google’s algorithm would prefer to rank a site that has 50 washingtonpost.com backlinks, or just one?

The thing is, that’s how Moz calculates DA. As mentioned, Ahrefs has its own version, Domain Rating (DR), and Semrush has Authority Score (AS). DR is described by Ahrefs as a “less granular” version of DA that measures a website’s backlink profile, and is calculated like so:

Ahrefs also mentions that DR isn’t just about how many high DR sites link to yours, but how many sites that these high DR sites link to.

Semrush’s AS also differs, because it not only takes into account link power (the quality and quantity of backlinks), but your monthly organic traffic and spam indicators, which include having no organic rankings on the SERP, a high % of dofollow domains, and more.

Is a High DR Better Than a High DA?

As you can see, each proprietary score offers something different; so a high DR isn’t necessarily better (or worse) than a high DA. It just depends on what you’re looking for. All tools point to having a strong backlink profile, but as a rule of thumb, it’s better that you focus on monitoring one consistently and comparing it against competitors.

By analyzing your DA, you get a top-level overview of your backlink profile and performance, while DR tells you more about the strength of your site’s backlink profile. AS, on the other hand, is a more comprehensive look at your SEO performance. All of these scores are great for identifying opportunities for link building so that you can create a targeted strategy to build authority.

Domain Authority & AI Search (AEO)

H-E-E-A-T (Helpfulness, Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) isn’t only an important factor in SEO; it plays a role in Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), too, as LLMs favor content that’s credible and trustworthy. In fact, that’s the third most important visibility factor across LLMs.

Why does this matter for AEO, though? It’s simple: a high DA is a signal to AI models that your content is authoritative and trustworthy, making them more inclined to surface or cite your brand in its answers.

Let’s look at it this way: would you use a site with a low DA for research, or link to it on your website? Probably not, because like it or not, DA is a reflection of trust and credibility. So if you wouldn’t use these sites, AI won’t use them to synthesize an answer, either.

The thing to keep in mind is that, while these scores all take the quantity of backlinks into account, it shouldn’t be at the expense of quality, especially now. Too many backlinks that are irrelevant to your site or business have the potential to hurt your visibility in AI, because LLMs take content relevancy into account, including backlinks.

Essentially, while DA, DR, and AS aren’t a direct factor that influences how you rank in AI, having a strong backlink profile with high-quality, non-spammy links is a signal to AI that your website is one that it can cite or use to generate an answer that people can trust.

What Is a “Good” Domain Authority Score?

The general benchmark for DA scores is the following:

• 0-20 is low
• 30-40 is average
• 50-60 is good
• 60+ makes you a highly authoritative website

What you have to remember, though, is that what makes a “good” DA score is truly dependent on the niche or industry you’re in, which is determined by checking how your competitors score. You can use MozBar, a Chrome extension, to easily check your competitors’ DA.

How do you know what a low or high score is for your industry? We’ll give you some examples. If you’re an eCommerce website, you’re gonna need a score of 50 or above to make sure you’re ranking against large retailers. On the other hand, if you’re a small gardening business, you can probably get away with a DA of 20-40, since you’re likely not battling against massive competitors with high DAs and comprehensive SEO efforts.

6 Actionable Tactics to Increase Your Domain Authority

Now that we’ve discussed what makes DA important, we’re going to outline some strategies you can follow to make sure you have a high DA. Remember, even if it’s not a direct ranking factor, Google (and AI) is more inclined to rank sites that are trustworthy, and a strong backlink profile indicates that.

1. Prioritize Your Backlink Profile

We just said it, but we’ll say it again: a strong backlink profile is a trust signal and the driving factor behind DA and other proprietary scores. Here’s how to build one:

Focus on High-Quality Links

Don’t try to get your website linked to just about every website on the internet. Make sure you’re choosing websites that are related to your niche and also carry a high DA. It’s better to have fewer links that are higher quality, rather than a million low-quality links.

Create “Link-Worthy” Content

Creating original data, research, and definitive guides that nobody has done before, or goes further than what others have already done, is a great way to gain links from high DA sites. It’s also a win-win strategy; creating high-quality content is great for your brand image and serving users’ needs, while also attracting backlinks.

Guest Posting

While it’s less popular than before, it’s still worth it to guest post on relevant sites in your niche that have a high DA. By doing this, you can link to your website while also building your own authority as an author, which has positive implications for your site as well.

Broken Link Building

This one takes some time and effort, but could have some benefits if you’re willing to put in the work. Essentially, with this strategy, you look for websites in your niche that have broken links and tell the webmaster that they can replace that link with yours instead. Also, you can take the opportunity to see where your brand is being mentioned without a link, and suggest that a link to your site be added.

Backlink Audit & Cleanup

You should audit your backlink profile at least once every quarter by using an SEO tool that tracks your backlinks and can also detect those that are spammy, toxic, or irrelevant. From there, you can use Google’s Disavow tool within GSC to tell Google not to disassociate them from your site. It’s worth mentioning, though, that if you don’t do this properly, it could actually hurt your site performance. So, make sure that any links that your tool identifies as spammy are actually spammy by investigating them yourself before telling GSC to disavow them.

2. Create & Optimize High-Quality Content (H-E-E-A-T)

As we mentioned, H-E-E-A-T, particularly that last A-T, are strong ranking signals that build your DA, and that tell both Google and AI that your content is worth ranking or mentioning. If you’re performing SEO and AEO, you should be creating H-E-E-A-T already, but here are some ways to take it further.

• Build Topical Authority: Develop content clusters around related topics to your niche. You can research topics by typing in keywords that your customers may look up and seeing what shows up in the “People Also Ask” box. The key is to make sure that you’re writing content that your audience actually finds helpful and answers questions they’re actually asking, which strengthens your authority.
• Write In-Depth & Comprehensive Content: AI specifically prefers citing and mentioning content that goes in-depth, rather than content that simply skims the surface of a topic. Additionally, content that adds a new perspective or unique take to a topic is better for users and also has a higher likelihood of ranking or being mentioned.
• Refresh Old Content: You should regularly update existing pages with new stats, insights, and best practices. Fresh content attracts users, which can improve rankings.

3. Build Brand Recognition & Social Signals

While this is adjacent to link building, it focuses more on gaining brand mentions rather than gaining links. Making sure your brand is visible where relevant is a gateway to earning that link, from the source that mentions you or others.

Digital PR

To gain mentions, you should launch a strategic PR campaign that targets websites relevant to your niche. For help with that, you can look at the list of top cited domains in LLMs that Goodie compiled. They also compiled industry-specific ones, for Beauty, SaaS, and Consumer Finance.

Social Promotion

Mentions on social media don’t directly impact DA, but they do increase visibility, which could lead to more link opportunities. Essentially, just the fact that people are talking about your brand can lead to backlinks, but that means a sustained effort to get people talking about your brand on social media.

Not to mention, social and search are converging like they never have before: between social media as a search engine and social platforms being crawled and indexed by Google, you’ll be worse off by not incorporating social media into your search strategy.

4. Optimize Your Internal Linking Structure

While backlinks build DA, an intelligent internal linking structure determines how that “link juice” gets distributed across your site. Link juice refers to the authority or value passed from one webpage to another through a link, which can be passed to your most important pages.

To execute this, you can use the pillar-cluster model, which is a “hub-and-spoke” internal linking structure that contains multiple pillar pages that are an authority on one topic, and link out to individual pages covering subtopics within the broader topic.

Something else you can do when you’re creating this internal linking structure is to make sure that you have descriptive anchor text. This doesn’t mean throwing a link on something that says “click here,” but instead, linking descriptive text that summarizes what the page is about.

5. Master Technical SEO & Site Performance

A strong site performance and great technical SEO and AEO can improve your DA by increasing your site’s quality and trustworthiness, making it more likely to rank and naturally attract backlinks. Moz also notes that “a slow, outdated, or unsecured website can negatively affect your Domain Authority.” To prevent that, here are some things you can do to make sure your site is technically sound.

Core Web Vitals

PageSpeed Insights, a tool from Google, measures things like Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay, and Cumulative Layout Shift. These all take into account your page and content loading speeds, and if they’re too slow, the tool will give you specific tasks you can execute to optimize your loading time.

Mobile-Friendliness

Making sure your website is mobile-friendly is another key component to maintaining a technically sound website. This is because Google operates on a mobile-first indexing system, meaning the mobile version of your site is the main version used for indexing, crawling, and ranking. So if your mobile experience is poor, your entire site’s perceived quality and ability to rank (AKA, your DA) will suffer.

Security

A secure website is one that has an SSL certificate, which is when your website starts with HTTPS (not HTTP). Ensure that you have an SSL certificate implemented, because if you don’t, it could deter people from using your site.

Site Crawlability

Optimizing your site crawlability means that you’re not wasting crawl budget on unnecessary pages. First, you should create an XML sitemap, which lists all the important URLs on your website that you want search engines like Google to crawl and index.

Then, create and implement robots.txt and LLMs.txt files which tell search engines and AI crawlers which pages they shouldn’t bother crawling. Finally, you can run tests with Screaming Frog to see if you have any technical issues on your site that need to be addressed.

6. Enhance User Experience (UX)

Finally, great UX can improve your DA, because people who actually enjoy spending time on your site are more inclined to link to it, whether that be in a piece of content they’re writing or a Reddit comment.

The best way to improve your UX is by making sure your content is scannable. This means short paragraphs, H2s and H3s, and bullet points. This also makes it easier for AI to parse your content. A good internal linking structure also helps with this, as it makes your site easier to navigate for both humans and crawlers.

Playing the Long Game to Build DA

The most important thing to remember about building DA is that it’s a metric that reflects your overall SEO health, and it’s not the only thing that you should be focusing on. That’s why the strategies we provided don’t solely focus on link building. It doesn’t matter how many high quality backlinks you have if your website doesn’t have strong content that’s technically sound.

​And now with AI, building trust and authority, the key components of DA, are essential. AI prefers to mention and cite sources that it knows it (and users) can trust, and DA is a direct reflection of that. You can start building it by performing a backlink audit to see where you’re being linked and how, and start researching top-ranking and cited domains in your niche to target them as a part of your PR and backlinking strategy.

Domain Authority: Frequently Asked Questions