Domain Authority

Domain Authority (DA) is a score from 0 to 100, developed by Moz, that predicts how likely a website is to rank in search results compared with other sites. It isn't a Google metric — Google has never published a site-wide score — but it's the industry's most widely used stand-in for the thing Google clearly does measure: how much the rest of the web vouches for you. The score is built mainly from your link profile: how many separate sites link to yours, how trusted those sites are themselves, and how those links have accumulated over time.

Two things trip people up. First, the scale is logarithmic — moving from 10 to 20 is far easier than moving from 40 to 50, so a small store shouldn't compare itself to Amazon. Second, DA is relative: it's recalculated against the whole web, so your score can dip slightly even when nothing on your site changed, simply because other sites earned links faster. That's why CataSEO pairs it with Authority Trend, which shows the direction over 13 months rather than one snapshot.