What is "website authority"?

"Website authority" is an SEO concept that refers to the "strength" of a given domain.

Some people call this "domain authority," which is not to be confused with the Domain Authority (DA) metric from Moz. When we talk about domain authority, we're talking about a general SEO concept that's synonymous with "website authority".

Here at Ahrefs, we have a website authority metric of our own called Domain Rating. It runs on a scale from zero to a hundred. The higher a website's Domain Rating (DR), the stronger and more authoritative it is.

The free tool above shows your website's "authority" as calculated by Ahrefs (i.e., Domain Rating).

How we calculate our Domain Rating (DR) score

Domain Rating (DR) looks at the quantity and quality of external backlinks to a website.

Here's how we calculate this metric in simple terms:

• Look at how many unique domains link to the target website;

• Look at the "authority" of those linking domains;

• Take into account how many unique domains each of those sites link to;

• Apply some math and coding magic to calculate “raw” DR scores;

• Plot these scores on a 100-point scale

Domain Rating doesn't take into account any other variables like link spam, traffic, domain age, etc.

Learn more about Domain Rating here.

Why the "authority" of your domain matters

Google representatives consistently deny the use of "domain authority" as a ranking factor. But according to Google's John Mueller, they do have a sitewide score that "maps to similar things."

Plus, when we studied the correlation between Domain Rating (DR) and keyword rankings for 218,713 domains, we found that the two correlate well.