SEO Link Builders Beware : Stop Optimizing For Domain Authority

 This week, Moz announced it has updated its Domain Authority (DA) score, and as we expected, it caused confusion within some segments of the SEO industry. Some, maybe more novice, SEOs confuse the DA metric with an internal metric used by Google. This is fueled in no small part by agencies and vendors that pitch their ability to “improve your Domain Authority.”

DA is not a Google metric. It is a metric that Moz, an SEO toolset provider, came up with. To be clear, Moz has never claimed that Google uses DA. In fact, Moz has clearly stated that DA is not a Google metric and instead the DA score is based on its own datasets and algorithms.

Moz is not the only company to come up with its own internal link scores, Majestic, Ahrefs and many other tool providers have their own scores.

DA doesn’t influence your Google rankings. Since DA is not a Google metric, it has zero impact on how well or how poorly you rank in Google. If your DA score goes up or goes down, you should not expect your Google rankings to follow.

But, this hype history starts with Google PageRank. Much of this confusion dates back to Google’s own marketing hype around PageRank or PR. In 2000, Google made this score visible for any page in the browser with its Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer. PageRank fever took over, and link building became big business. Many SEOs obsessed over PR scores and used to buy, sell and trade links based on PageRank. And a whole lot of snake oil link building schemers and spammers flooded the market to take advantage of this new economy. When Google stopped making PageRank publicly visible in 2016, the industry began looking for another metric to base the link building economy around. (For a history of the rise and fall of PageRank,