Domain authority is a number by which analytical tools estimate a website's strength based on its link profile. It is important to know that it is not an official search engine metric but a commercial tool's own estimate, with each tool calculating it differently, so the values are not comparable between them. It is useful for comparison with competitors and for tracking your own website's development over time, not as a goal in itself. Trying to raise this number at any cost leads to buying low-quality links that do not help actual rankings. When assessing a website a link is to come from, it is also worth looking at whether it has genuine traffic and topical relevance – these matter more than the authority value itself.
See also: Backlink profile, Competitor Backlink Analysis, Author authority and website authority.
