What is Domain Authority?

Domain Authority is a term coined by Moz to help user understand the relative strength of their website on internet. It is an indicative number derived from the data collected from various sources (direct and indirect) on different parameters on constituent pages of your domain.

This score for domain authority varies from 1 - 100 on logarithmic scale. 1 means lowest DA and 100 means the highest DA.

Moz spiders crawls the net periodically and collects details about the websites on the internet from various sources. It applies its proprietary algorithms to compare pages, keywords, back links, social media engagements, inter-connection of pages (i.e. internal links) and many other factors / sub factors to arrive at a number for your website that tells you about the ability of your pages to rank on a search engines.

This number is an indicative and the purpose is to notify you about your website's current positioning ability on the web.

When you know your competitor's DA score, you know where and how far you need to cover up to outclass your competitors on a targeted keyword. By digging deeper into how Moz calculates the DA and what parameters it uses in calculating DA, you will be able to figure out what is missing and what is the road ahead for you.

Larger domain authority (DA score) means larger monetization opportunity for your business.

When your DA score is improving with time, you know that you are working in right direction. Your content, quality and optimization efforts are working fine and helping to improve traffic potential. Sinner or later, you will start getting more and more traffic.

Yes, you can help increase DA of your website.
But you can not control it directly. DA changes when the factors affecting DA changes.

Considering a new domain, it is a good score. But, if your domain age is more than a year, this score is low. On average, a site above 1 year domain age shall achieve a DA of 40+.

The factors that affect your DA are domain age, number of posts, inbound back-links and on page SEO.

In simple terms, logarithmic score means that as soon as you scale up the level of difficulty to score higher will increase exponentially. It means - to score from 1 to 20 will be far easier than to score from 21 to 40. You will require more and more efforts to improve your DA as you go higher up the scale.