Also called DA, Domain rating, DR.
Domain authority is a third-party score estimating how likely a site is to rank. It is invented by SEO tool vendors and is not used by Google.
It shows up in a lot of contractor marketing proposals as though it were a Google metric, which makes it a useful test of who you are talking to.
Google has said repeatedly it does not use these scores. They are a tool vendor's model of link strength, useful for rough comparison between sites and useless as a target, because the score is an estimate of an outcome rather than a cause of it.
Where it does real damage is when it becomes the deliverable. Buying links to move a number is the shortest path to a manual penalty, and a contractor site with a raised score and no rankings has paid for a scoreboard rather than a result.
A proposal that promises to raise this figure, without saying which queries you will rank for or what it means in booked jobs, is describing something that cannot be spent. Ask for the second thing instead.
Related terms
E-E-A-T is the framework in Google's search quality guidelines covering experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and ...
City pages are individual pages targeting a specific town or suburb a business serves, rather than one page listing ev...
llms.txt is a proposed file at a site's root that gives AI systems a clean, structured summary of what the site contai...
