Domain authority

Where the number comes from

Several SEO software companies run their own crawl of the web, count the links pointing at every site they find, weigh those links by where they came from, and boil the result down to one number. That number gets called domain authority, or domain rating, or authority score, depending on whose tool is open in front of you.

Two things follow from that, and both matter. First, the score is an estimate produced by an outside company, not a reading taken from inside a search engine. Google publishes no authority score for your site. Second, every vendor uses its own formula and its own crawl, so one website can score noticeably differently from one tool to the next. If two agencies quote you two different numbers for the same domain, neither one is lying to you.

The scores also move on their own. A vendor reworks its formula or refreshes its index, and every site in the country shifts a little, including yours, on a week when you did nothing at all.

What the score is good for, and what it is not

It is a decent rough comparison. Glance at four competitors, notice that three sit in the same neighborhood and one is far above them, and you have learned something useful in ten seconds. Treat that as a reason to go look at what the outlier publishes, not as a target to hit.

It is a poor goal, because local search does not work the way the score implies. As a worked example, say a heating company scoring in the twenties, with an address inside the city, outranks a statewide competitor scoring in the fifties for furnace repair near me. That is normal. On searches with local intent, where the searcher is standing, what the business actually does, and the condition of its Google Business Profile carry more weight than any sitewide authority estimate.

This is also the number that shows up most often in sales pitches, because it moves and it screenshots well. When somebody quotes a price to raise it, ask a plainer question: what will you publish, and who is going to link to it. The work that moves the score and the work that moves the phone are the same unglamorous work, real pages about what you do and mentions from real sources in your area, which is what ongoing local SEO covers. Orlando-based, we have worked with local service businesses nationwide since 2008, and the score has never been the thing a homeowner was looking at before calling.

Authority, topical authority, and E-E-A-T

Three separate ideas share one word. Domain authority is a vendor's estimate of a whole site's link strength. Topical authority describes how thoroughly one site covers one subject, which you build by publishing rather than receive from a tool. E-E-A-T is Google's shorthand for experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust, used in the guidelines it writes for human quality raters, and it points at evidence on the page instead of a number.

If you are going to chase one of the three, chase the middle one. Covering your own subject properly is inside your control. A vendor's opinion of your domain is not.