How To Increase Your Domain Authority (DA) In 2026

“How do I increase my domain authority?”

It’s a frustrating question that I get all the time.

Domain authority has become a “gold standard” metric to measure the overall strength and quality of any domain.

According to recent industry research, over 70% of SEO professionals use domain authority checkers monthly.

A lot of people (wrongly) consider it as one of the best SEO metrics to:

In one simple number, you know how your site stacks up against the rest – which has led to SEOs obsessing over domain authority for years (and will continue to wrongly do so).

On top of that:

AI platforms like ChatGPT and Claude are now prioritizing authoritative sources to generate answers. This means that building overall authority is crucial for AI search visibility.

So even though it has nothing to do with Google, I will show you how to increase your domain authority step by step.

But first, I want to tell you everything you need to actually know about domain authority.

What is Domain Authority (DA)?

Domain authority is a metric created by Moz to measure how likely your website is to rank in the search engine results pages (SERPs). Your site gets a score out of 100. The higher the score the more likely your website will rank.

Domain authority is purely based on the number and quality of high quality backlinks your domain has.

Moz uses their small link index combined with machine learning to guess the ability of your website to rank.

Then, provides an overall domain authority score.

Sounds like the number #1 SEO metric to focus on, right?

While domain authority can be a good indicator, in general – domain authority has become wildly overrated.

In fact, domain authority became such a popular metric that Google were forced to make a public comment that they do not use it:

So does that mean that domain authority is completely useless?

Short answer: No.

Domain authority is still an “ok” metric to measure your own performance against your competitor’s performance.

Over time you can track domain authority and see if your website is improving or not.

The thing to remember is…

That means that a higher domain authority score does not inherently mean higher rankings or increased levels of organic traffic.

4x Tips To Increase Domain Authority (DA)

Even though we know that increasing your domain authority will not necessarily translate to higher search engine rankings, lots of people still want to increase it.

Domain authority is purely based on your website’s backlink profile so you need to focus your efforts here.

Each of these four tips will help you attract and build high quality links that will increase your domain authority.

As generative search grows, implementing these strategies will help you ensure visibility across:

1. Create High Quality Content To Attract More Links

There is no way around it:

Ideally, it needs to be the best answer available to the keywords you are targeting.

Why?

The goal of any search engine is to connect users to high quality content that helps them.

That means it is incredibly important to produce excellent website content that not only ranks in Google but adds a ton of value for the readers.

This gives you more visibility in the SERPs (search engine result pages) and ultimately make the content link-worthy and shareable.

Authoritative content with citations and statistics can also boost visibility by 30-40% because AI platforms are prioritizing well-documented and credible sources.

People want to link to high quality content that helps others:

When you are doing research for a new blog post, think about how you can make your piece completely unique.

Ask yourself – “What can I add that no one else has written about?”

This will help you create high quality content that provides lots of value to readers. Don’t forget to add:

…To break up the written text and make your content more engaging.

If you really want to know how to make your writing crisper, sharper and more readable, then check out my SEO copywriting hacks (that you can complete with my 45+ steps SEO checklist for a well-optimize content).

These have become the basis for my own content creation.

And most people will glaze over this, but my favourite content strategy to attract links is the statistics strategy.

But if you don’t like writing:

You could build some handy tools like this backlink blacklist tool for example.

2. Build More High Quality Backlinks

Recent link building data shows that 73.2% of SEO professionals believe backlinks influence the chance of appearing in AI search results whilst he number 1 ranking page on Google has an average of 3.8x more backlinks than pages ranking in positions 2-10.

Building high quality backlinks is the ultimate way to increase your website’s domain authority even if Google doesn’t use it as part of their ranking algorithm.

Think about it:

If your site’s domain authority is 32 and you get a backlink from a site with a domain authority of 75, this will contribute to increasing yours.

Ultimately what’s happening is that the link from the DA 75 (domain authority) site is signalling that your site is trustworthy (in Moz’s eyes) which means your domain authority increases.

Don’t know how many links you should build? Follow my step by step process to determine how many backlink you need to rank and archive your goals.

Note: Edu backlinks and gov backlinks are the most authoritative backlinks you can build.

But link building takes tons of time and effort, right?

I get it. I have been building links since 2011 and I know how frustrating it is to manually build quality backlinks.

Unfortunately…

Links are also one of the most significant Google ranking factors.

Quality backlinks not only boost domain authority but also increase your chances of being cited by AI search engines like ChatGPT and Claude that are evaluating source credibility before generating answers to questions.

But if you want to skip the headache of building your own high quality backlinks – there is a solution…

Simply outsource all of your link building to a reputable link building service like LinksThatRank.

You can focus on producing great content for your readers while the link building agency takes care of all the link building. Easy!

3. Get Rid Of Your Low Quality Backlinks

Just like good links will increase your domain authority…

Low quality backlinks are going to bring it down.

Remember that Google see links being built to your site as “mini endorsements” or “votes”.

Because you don’t have direct control over who links to you, search engines take these endorsements really seriously.

Think about it like this:

You are running to be elected into office and are looking to get endorsements from various people.

You don’t want just anyone endorsing you. You want people who are well trusted in the community to support your campaign. These are the people who are going to convince voters to vote for you.

In the same way, if someone known to be dodgy and not trustworthy endorses you, that’s not going to do any good.

In fact, it may even cause more harm as voters will think you hang out in “the wrong crowds“.

Now let’s put it all together…

The bottom line is that you need to stop endorsements from spammy domains.

You need to actively nurture your backlink profile and remove low quality backlinks as much as possible.

Now you could pay someone to do this but it’s:

It’s much better to do it yourself. How do you do it?

Just use my Backlink Blacklist Tool to help identify links that need to be removed.

Your domain authority will increase if you keep the low quality links at bay and consistently build high domain authority links.

4. Build More Traffic-Driven Links

The authority of a link is not the only thing that matters.

Organic traffic also plays an important part in the value of backlinks.

If you have tons of high domain authority (DA) backlinks but none of those sites gets any organic traffic, they are not nearly as effective.

How come?

At the end of the day, people create content for others to read and get value from. If your content isn’t providing value to anyone – it’s basically just dead weight.

When a site with high domain authority and tons of organic traffic every month links to you, they are recommending your site to their own readers.

You can use any of my 19 link building strategies to get more quality traffic driven links built to your site.

Link building not your thing? I don’t blame you.

Buy a reputable link building package like the ones offer by LinksThatRank which guarantees that they only build links from reputable sites with a certain amount of organic traffic every month.

Building links that have traffic flowing from them is a great way to improve domain authority.

How To Use Domain Authority Correctly

Before you jump in and start using each tactic to increase your domain authority…

…you must understand how to use domain authority correctly!

How Is Domain Authority Calculated?

Domain authority is calculated by combining and evaluating a number of link factors.

The four most important link factors are:

1. Linking root domains
2. Total number of links
3. Quality of link profile
4. Trust of link profile

Moz then takes these factors and calculates a website’s domain authority score with their machine learning algorithm.

Basically, the algorithm predicts how often that domain appears in the search results relative to other domains.

For example…

If domain A is predicted to be shown by search engines more than domain B, you could expect domain A to have a higher domain authority rating.

The important thing to understand about domain authority is that it’s relative to other websites. Moz doesn’t just look at a bunch of factors then give you a domain authority score out of 100.

They take the link factors and compare your site’s performance in the search engines against other sites.

So, your domain authority is likely to change based on the overall performance of your competitors.

Check Your Own Domain Authority Score

Checking your own domain authority score is really easy.

Moz allows you to do it completely free on their website through their domain analysis tool.

Head over to the Moz domain authority page.

Now, type in your domain and click “Analyse Domain”.

Moz will quickly analyse your domain and give you your DA rating.

You can even do this with your competitors to see how their domain authority scores stack up against you,

What Is A Good Domain Authority Score?

Most people think the goal of a domain authority score is to reach 100/100…

But this isn’t actually the case.

Getting a domain authority score of 100 is pretty much impossible to reach.

Let me give you some context…

Here are some of the most popular websites in the world and their domain authority scores:

Unless you plan to run a hugely popular brand like Facebook, domain authority 100 shouldn’t be your goal.

So, how do you know if you have a good domain authority score or not?

Well, it’s relative to your direct online competitors.

Indeed, if your domain authority score is higher, Moz is predicting that you will outrank them in most search results.

While you can take all of your competitors and analyse their domain authority scores, often just taking the top 3 is enough.

After all – your goal in terms of rankings should be to rank in the top 3 positions (if not number #1).

Analyse Your Competitors’ Sites To Understand Why They Get A Better Score

Noticed a few competitors have a higher DA score than you?

You can see why they have a higher score and even understand how to beat them by running a backlink analysis on your competitors.

Competitor backlink analysis’ is one of my favourite SEO strategies of all time.

You get a road map into why your competitors are ranking ahead of you.

A backlink analysis will help you discover three important things:

1. Uncover competitors link building strategies
2. Find competitors most important backlinks
3. Identify how you can replicate your competitors’ backlink strategy

To do my backlink analysis, I use Ahrefs.

Ahrefs has the largest link database of any SEO tools in the world – second only to Google. Crazy, right?

With Ahrefs you can see every single link your competitors have.

Ready to get started with your competitor analysis? Then follow my backlink analysis guide.

Copy What They Do Best To Improve Domain Authority

Once you have done a backlink analysis on your competitors, it’s time to use that information to improve your own website’s domain authority.

Yes, you heard that right.

You simply want to copy what’s working for your competitors and apply it to your own site. This is the fastest and most sure way of improving your domain authority.

Basically, you will take your competitors’ top links and go and steal those exact links.

If they came from a:

Your competitors have done all of the hard work.

Now, you just need to go out and copy them.

There is simply no need to reinvent the wheel in this case.

Follow this guide if you want to learn how I steal and copy my competitors’ link-building strategies.

A Few Things to Keep In Mind

Now you are ready to increase your own site’s domain authority. But before you do, there are a few things that you need to remember.

You Can’t Fake Real Authority

At the end of the day, there is no way to fake real website authority. The only way to increase your domain authority is do the work and build quality links.

This is Moz’s premium metric and as I have said before, it is widely used in the SEO/digital marketing world to measure the overall rankability of sites.

If you don’t want to build your own links, then have a link building agency do it for you:

The only thing you need to ensure is:

You can confidently trust the link building agency.

You don’t want them building low quality/spammy links that achieve nothing for your site or even worse…

End up decreasing your site’s domain authority.

Your Domain Authority Score Can Change At Any Time

Your own domain authority score accurately measures the ability of your site to rank in the SERPs.

This means your site’s domain authority score can change at any time.

Here’s why:

We all know that rankings go up and down on a day to day basis.

That’s just part of the SEO game.

There are tons of factors that can change the ranking positions including:

The last one is the most likely.

If your competitor builds a huge amount of quality backlinks, their domain authority will increase. Because domain authority is relative to other sites this might impact the domain authority score of your site.

Domain Authority Is Not Used By Google And Will Have No Direct Impact On Your Rankings

This is a big one to keep in the back of your mind.

Domain authority is NOT a Google metric.

It comes from Moz and they are predicting it based on their own algorithm and what factors THEY think are relevant.

If you increase your domain authority and don’t see any significant ranking changes, this is probably why.

Domain authority is still one of the best ways to compare your website against key competitors.

There really aren’t any other metrics I have come across that universally does this as well.

Just remember that it’s a core indicator metric and not something that directly affects your search engine rankings.

Wrapping It Up

So now you know how to increase your domain authority!

You are armed with my top four tactics that will directly increase your domain authority.

Do the necessary link building work (or outsource it) and build real website authority that moves the needle forward on both the domain authority metric and more importantly – Google.

With data predicting that 70% of searches will become zero click by the end of 2025 as users get answers directly from AI platforms, domain authority serves as a foundation for both:

But Remember:

Also, check out my review of the top link building services.