Is “domain authority” a Google metric or a third-party invention?
- Published November 6, 2026
- Linked from 1 answer
- In a cluster of 77
A third-party invention. Domain Authority is a score made by the SEO software company Moz, and similar scores from other tools carry names such as Domain Rating or Authority Score. Google’s guidance on third-party SEO tools is direct about what such numbers can and cannot be: “Third-party tools don’t have access to our internal ranking data.” Each score is the vendor’s own estimate, built from the vendor’s own crawl, and Google does not publish or use it.
Why the score gets mistaken for Google’s
The name sounds official, and the number moves in ways that look like rankings. Google’s guidance names the problem: “Some third-party services provide data that some users of those tools misinterpret as somehow being from Google.” Two tools can give the same site different scores because each counts different links with a different formula, which is a clear sign that neither number is a reading of Google’s systems.
What the score can and cannot tell you
| Use | Fit? |
|---|---|
| Comparing your link profile with a competitor's in the same tool | Reasonable, as a rough comparison |
| Watching whether your own link profile grows over time in one tool | Reasonable, as a trend |
| Predicting whether a page will outrank another | No; rankings are decided per query, page by page |
| Deciding which sites to get links from | Weak on its own; relevance and real readership matter more |
| Reporting progress as if it were a Google measure | No |
Google does look at links: its ranking systems guide lists link analysis systems, including PageRank. So the scores track something real in a general way, the links pointing to a site, but they are an outside estimate of one input, not the output Google ranks with. The same distinction between a tool’s score and Google’s systems comes up for the made-up E-E-A-T score.
Measure with Google’s own data
Google’s guidance recommends Search Console for data that comes from Google Search itself. Use it for what matters: which queries your pages show for, at what position, and with how many clicks. Keep third-party authority scores as a comparison tool between sites, and never set one as the goal.
Add a comment