What DA actually is
Domain Authority is a product feature. Moz — an SEO software company — built a machine-learning model that reads a domain's link data from Moz's own web index and outputs a 1–100 guess at how likely that domain is to rank. It is, precisely, one vendor's prediction of Google's behaviour.
That's not a criticism; a calibrated prediction is useful. The problem is what happened next. The number escaped the tool, got printed on pitch decks, and became a currency. An entire link-selling market in India now prices inventory in DA, and a founder who's never opened Moz will still be quoted "DA 45 site, ₹12,000".
Google has stated repeatedly that it does not use Domain Authority. Google plainly runs site-level signals of its own — its leaked internal documentation has been read as referencing site authority attributes — but that's Google's plumbing, invisible from outside and unrelated to Moz's arithmetic.
The logarithmic scale, and what it means for you
DA runs 1 to 100 and it's logarithmic, which resolves most of the confusion about it. Twenty to thirty is an ordinary year of decent link earning. Sixty to seventy is what a national newspaper does. Two consequences follow: DA growth naturally decelerates, so a flat score in year two doesn't mean the work stopped; and reading DA 25 as "half of DA 50" is arithmetic nonsense.
- A new domain starts near 1 and stays in single digits until it has links at all. Normal, and not a problem to solve.
- A new Indian site after a real year of work typically sits in the teens to low thirties. The range is wide because it depends entirely on whether anyone had a reason to link to you.
- Established Indian D2C and SaaS brands commonly land in the 30s and 40s. National publishers sit far higher, which is why placements on them are priced the way they are.
The one thing DA is genuinely good for
Comparison, on the same scale, on the same day. If you're choosing between two outreach targets and one is DA 12 and the other DA 48, the second is probably better linked and probably the better placement. As a way to sort a hundred prospects quickly, DA saves you hours.
It fails the moment it becomes a goal. "Get us to DA 40" isn't a business outcome, and a determined vendor can hit it while your organic leads stay exactly where they were — because the number responds to link volume, and link volume is purchasable. That's the argument in domain authority is a vanity metric. Our rule: DA is a filter, never a KPI. The KPI is what shows up in your CRM.
Why DA-priced links are a red flag
Follow the incentive. A marketplace needs a price list, a price list needs a number, and the number has to be cheap to verify (Moz gives it away), cheap to move (buy links and DA climbs), and impressive to a buyer who doesn't know it isn't a Google metric. DA satisfies all three. That's why it, and not traffic, became the unit of account.
So a "DA 45" placement tells you almost nothing. The site may have no organic traffic, no editorial process, and a write-for-us page quoting rates in dollars. Check traffic and topical fit before any authority score — both are harder to fake. Domain Rating has the same weakness in a different shape; the two are compared in DA vs DR.
DA versus topical authority
DA is domain-wide and link-derived: how well connected is this site to the rest of the web. Topical authority is subject-specific: how thoroughly does it cover one field.
Topical authority wins the fights you care about. A DA 22 site with forty genuinely useful pages on GST filing for freelancers beats a DA 65 general business portal on those queries, because the portal's authority isn't about that subject. Good news if you're the smaller site: depth is buyable with effort, domain-wide authority mostly isn't.