Published: 06/01/2025

Author: Ryan Walsh

If you are a start-up British company, you are most likely to want to improve your business’s search engine optimisation. To do this, you may have purchased an SEO tool, such as Moz Pro. Within that tool, the term “domain authority” is often mentioned.

You might think Google uses DA (Domain Authority) as a ranking factor.

Because the “DA” score is often mentioned in various SEO tools, you might automatically think that Google uses this as a ranking factor.
However, Google doesn’t.

Instead, it’s a score that is used to group many different ranking factors, so if you improve it, such as improving your backlink profile, this will typically improve your DA score.

In this in-depth and comprehensive article, we will explain more about DA, what it is, how it can improve the ranking of your company website, and why it’s an SEO metric that you should be actively monitoring.

 

In this article, we are going to look at the following topics:’

• What exactly is domain authority?
• Why any business should be aiming to improve domain authority score
• How exactly is DA for a company website calculated?
• How can any business go about improving its DA domain authority score?
• What SEO tools are available to check a business’s domain authority score?

 

First things first, what is domain authority?

You know when you go to the gym, and someone states they can bench press, say, 140kg? Well, this is a measure of their strength.

Page authority and domain authority are different.

Before we go any further, it’s important to note that domain authority and page authority are two different things; we shall explain the difference between these terms.

What is generally considered a good domain authority score?

A domain authority score of over 60 is generally considered excellent. Yet for a new start-up business, where you have just registered a domain name, it’s going to be very hard to improve the DA straightaway. Websites with very high domain authority—that’s over 60+—typically have been live for a very long period of time.

 

New websites

Any good SEO business should check whether a domain name has been used before selecting and purchasing it.

What you most definitely do not want is to register any domain name that has used spam or black hat tactics in the past. For example, that domain name might have had a company building spam links to it or buying low-quality links.

That domain will then be hit by a Google algorithmic penalty, meaning that it will be de-indexed with the click of your fingers.

Now, when you talk to any reasonable agency that truly understands search engine optimisation, they will tell you it’s very hard to recover from a Google penalty. So, our best advice is not to buy a domain name with low-quality SEO implemented in the past.

 

How exactly is domain authority calculated?

So, domain authority is calculated by directly comparing your business and where it appears in the SERPs with your direct competitors.

 

What factors are used to calculate domain authority?

Your business backlink profile

Businesses which accumulate a ton of good-quality links will rank higher on Google.
The best way to achieve this is to earn links. You can earn links by publishing quality content marketing.
When a business accumulates good quality relevant links from respected companies, your business will improve its DA score.

 

Root domains

So, this is a common mistake that many businesses make: They think that they have, say, 1,000 links, and that’s excellent.

But those links might just come from one domain. What’s better in SEO is that you have multiple referring mains. That’s as many quality backlinks as a business can obtain from relevant companies.

Again, the links must be high quality and relevant, and you want to diversify where the links are coming from.

To clarify, you want as many links as possible but from as many different domain names as possible. So, for example, let’s say you have 1,000 links; it would be perfect if those all came from different domains. Plus, the websites must be quality and relevant to that business sector.

 

Spam score

So, SEO—that’s search engine optimisation—is hard work. It takes a huge number of hours to improve SEO.

So, naturally, you’re always going to get businesses, even some marketing agencies, that don’t want to do hard work.

They want to try to fool Google’s algorithm into thinking that the website has stronger backlinks than it does. However, a word to the wise: don’t use black hat methods.

Don’t use search engine optimisation that could be deemed spam, don’t cut corners, and use the best white hat methods possible.

The reason is that the business could receive a Google penalty, such as a link penalty. An example of a link penalty would be the Google Penguin penalty. Now, businesses can receive a link penalty because they have built spam links.

So, don’t build spam links. Have an expert check the business’s backlink profile. Also, use various backlink-checking tools, such as Moz, to check the health of your business’s backlinks.

 

How can a business improve its domain authority?

So, businesses, especially start-ups, will want to improve their domain authority as quickly as possible.

Sometimes, they falsely believe that after making a series of improvements, they will see an improvement overnight.

Organic search engine optimisation doesn’t look like this. You won’t see any changes happening quickly, most certainly not overnight.

It takes many consecutive years to improve a business’s organic search engine optimisation and increase to a high standard where you have an extensive and well-built backlink profile. This might even take close to a decade.

The reason is that you will always have established websites in your business sector unless you’re launching a unique and new product or service, which is rare.

So, most of the time, you will be up against businesses that have been improving their domain authority and organic SEO for at least 10 years.

 

But how can a business improve its domain authority

Build quality backlinks

So, despite what some agencies say, backlink building is dead. Well, it’s not. The reason it’s not is that global brands and well-known businesses still rely on quality links to keep their multi-billion-dollar businesses ranked high on Google.

And you don’t need to be a PLC business, say, to have quality links; you could be a sole trader. The point we are making is that your large agencies, you’re really large companies, are still ploughing serious investment into their marketing strategies to build quality links.
So, a business with good quality links, many of them, will generally have a better DA score.

Backlink checking tools

So, who’s ranking top in your business sector?

Which website ranks right at the top for many super competitive keywords?

Usually, these websites have many quality links.

The good news is that you can have a look at your competitor’s backlink profile.

Tools such as Ahrefs and Moz Pro allow you to insert, for example, your competitors’ backlink profiles into a Microsoft Excel document.

This allows you to examine and look at where your competitors are gaining their backlinks from.

Then, for example, you might spot backlink-building opportunities. Let’s give you an example: Let’s say that there’s a standard industry body or qualification that most of your competitors and your business have.

You might notice that your direct competitor is listed on the website of that industry body, offering a direct link.

Your business may also have this qualification, yet it might not have a link on that website referring to your domain.

Therefore, sometimes, just via a simple e-mail, you can contact, let’s say, an industry body, let’s say, in the construction industry, it’s the CITB, and you can ask them to add a link to your company website.

Create top-quality content that shines a bright star

Do you know how fishermen used the night sky to guide and navigate them at night? Well, your business should think a bit like this.
How can you publish a piece of content marketing that stands out, shines, and is the absolute best answer to a question relating to your business?

That piece of work could be evergreen content marketing, which answers the question so well that it has a very high Google E-EAT score.

Because it may have such a high Google E-EAT score, the page might rank on page one of Google internationally.

Because of this, it may receive tens of thousands of organic visitors every week. Some of these visitors may then cite your page in their content marketing, offering a direct link.

If you accumulate enough quality links, then this can improve your business’s domain authority.

Disavow low-quality links

We always describe backlinks as a bit like fuel for a car.

So, you’ll have good fuel, which is high performance and octane.

Then you’ll have rubbish fuel, low-octane-causing engine problems, and sluggish performance.

Well, this is exactly the same with backlinks. You’re going to get top-quality backlinks, which all businesses want. That’s backlinks from high-quality websites that are relevant; if you obtain enough quality links, these links will supercharge your business’s search engine optimisation to another level.

 

However, here’s the crux of the situation…

Quality links are hard to come by. But if you accumulate spam links—these are links throwing an anchor overboard—they’re going to hamper your SEO performance.

Link detox and disavowing backlinks.

Businesses should regularly and routinely review their backlink profiles and look for spam and low-quality links.
If the links are of low quality, often, the business needs to decide whether it’s best to disavow them and send a request to Google to disavow those links.

The reason is that if you don’t disavow links and you have a lot of spam links or even sometimes a small number of spam links, this can result in the business incurring a Google Penguin penalty.

A Google Penguin penalty can massively damage any business’s SEO. It can mean that the business jumps from page 1 of Google to page 7 or even beyond.

If the business has many spam links, sometimes Google can even totally remove it from Google altogether. This is called de-indexing the website; it basically means that the business is hit by a Google penalty and then removed completely for every keyword it once ranked for.

This can massively damage SEO moving forward. As any good agency will tell you, once a business has received a penalty, it can hamper and damage SEO moving forward.

Having and keeping a site map updated is important. A page or a blog post will never appear on Google unless it can be indexed.

Therefore, if a page can’t get indexed, it won’t appear in Google’s SERPs.

It won’t accumulate links if it doesn’t appear in Google’s SERPs.

It won’t have a high DA score if it doesn’t accumulate links.

So, the first stage of improving any business’s domain authority is to make sure all the pages and blog posts you want to appear on Google can be indexed, read by Googlebot, and, therefore, present in the SERPs.

If they can’t get indexed, it could be because the code blocks bots, such as Googlebot, from crawling and indexing that page. If the page can’t get indexed, it cannot gain organic visitors; therefore, it never naturally accumulates organic links.

Link juice

So, let’s say a huge, internationally well-known brand links to you.

Let’s say Nike.

Your SEO company would be like, “Wow, let’s say you run a gym. You get this link for a fitness event you’re hosting.”

That’s powerful.

If it’s a do-follow link passing what’s called link juice through to that domain, it will have a dramatic effect on your SEO by improving it.
What is link juice?

Link juice, aka link equity, occurs when a website sends its link juice through a domain. This is done via a backlink. For example, Nike.com linking to a local gym because of a fitness event would be an example of a brilliant backlink. This will positively impact the business’s search engine optimisation.

However, the SEO experts will want to use that link juice as best they can, so they will often use internal links to spread that link juice across multiple pages.

 

Let’s do some quick-fire SEO

Is domain authority a direct ranking factor?

No is the short answer. Google’s algorithms don’t use domain authority as a ranking factor.

However, backlinks are a ranking factor; they are at the top of the tree in terms of importance. Moz, which produces some of the best SEO tools on the planet, was the original creator of domain authority. It is an elegant way of summarising a business’s SEO strength.

Therefore, it’s used to quickly assess the quality of a business’s organic SEO.

What other uses does domain authority have?

Link builders, or just SEO agencies, when they are looking to build backlinks, will want, or they should want to build links, that’s backlinks, from businesses which have a high DA score.

The reason is that if they can obtain a do-follow backlink, the link juice can be directed towards their own site, which can positively impact and improve your search engine optimisation. So, generally speaking, the higher the DA, the more powerful that domain is, and the more link juice it can send to your website.

Plus, you also have to think about Google E-EAT here for just a second. Google’s own quality raters have said that they use backlinks to determine how authoritative a website is. So Google wants helpful, well-written content marketing.

Yet, to improve the authoritativeness of that page, you also want quality backlinks.

 

How do I improve my Domain Authority score?

Earn super high-quality backlinks.

What often separates a business ranking number 1 on Google from a business that’s ranking 77th?

Well, often, it’s the backlinks.

It’s the backlinks that give the website strength, and even before Google’s inception, they used Google PageRank, an algorithm that heavily relied on backlinks to decipher how strong or weak a business’s search engine optimisation was.

Fast-forward to 2025, and backlinks are still very much part of Google’s algorithm. In short, if your business wants to improve its domain authority, you have to build links.

To build links, our best advice is to write content marketing that has a very, very high Google E-EAT score. This will give that piece of content marketing the very best chance of ranking as high as possible and generating more organic visitors from Google.

The more readers, the more visitors; you have a better chance of receiving more backlinks.

In short, the main way of improving any website’s domain authority is for the business to earn quality backlinks. Again, we can’t overemphasise the point enough: never buy links, never build spam links.

Spam links will equal a Google penalty.

However, high-quality links can positively impact your business’s organic SEO.

Publish content marketing with a high Google E-EAT score

A common mistake business make is to churn out content marketing, that is, blog posts that are low quality regularly.

It might be, let’s say, 500 words of complete waffle, but it will not be helpful to a shopper.

Now, Google will likely not index this work because it only includes super-high-quality work in its index.