What Is Domain Authority and Should You Actually Care About It?
Domain Authority (DA) is a third-party metric built by Moz, not a Google ranking factor — Google has confirmed it doesn’t use DA at all. It’s a rough, useful estimate of how likely a site is to rank well, based mostly on backlink quantity and quality, scored 1–100 on a logarithmic scale. Worth understanding, not worth obsessing over.
Why it gets treated as gospel anyway
DA is easy to check with a free browser extension and gives a single, comparable number, which makes it tempting to use as a scoreboard against competitors. That simplicity is also its weakness — it says nothing about content quality, relevance, or the specific keywords you’re actually trying to rank for.
What actually predicts rankings better
Relevance to the specific search matters more than raw domain strength — a smaller, highly relevant local site regularly outranks a bigger, more “authoritative” one for local searches, because Google weighs topical and geographic relevance heavily for anything with local intent. Content quality, page experience, and up-to-date information all matter more day to day than a single backlink-derived score.
When DA is genuinely useful
It’s a reasonable, fast way to gauge whether a potential guest post or link opportunity is worth pursuing, and to track your own site’s backlink growth trend over time. It’s not useful as a target to chase for its own sake, and it’s definitely not something to quote to justify SEO pricing — a low DA site can still rank first for the searches that matter to it.
The honest takeaway
Glance at it occasionally as one input among many. Building genuinely relevant, well-structured content and a handful of real local links will move your actual rankings far more than any deliberate DA-chasing strategy.
Our local SEO work focuses on what actually moves rankings for South African searches, not vanity metrics.