An agency pitched a Bergen County law firm last spring on a six-month engagement to “raise your domain authority from 24 to 40.” The price was $4,200 a month. The firm asked us to look at the proposal before signing.
We told them to walk. Not because the agency was bad — because the metric they were selling does not exist in Google’s algorithm. Domain Authority is a Moz score. Google has never used it, never published anything resembling it, and never will.
What Domain Authority actually is
Moz built DA in the early 2010s as a way to give clients a single number that approximated “how strong is this site.” It is computed from Moz’s own crawl of the web, weighted by their internal model of link signals. It is a proxy. A useful one, sometimes. But it is not what Google ranks on.
Ahrefs has Domain Rating. SEMrush has Authority Score. Each is a different number computed differently. None of them are Google. Google has its own internal signals and does not share the formulas.
Why agencies pitch DA increases anyway
Because DA is easy to measure and easy to move. An agency can buy or earn a handful of links from sites with high DA scores, point them at your domain, and your DA will climb. The number on the dashboard goes up. The client sees progress.
Whether your actual Google rankings move is a separate question — and frequently the answer is “barely.” We have audited dozens of sites with DA jumps of 10 to 15 points over a year where the organic traffic curve was flat or down.
What Google actually weighs
Google has been clearer than people give it credit for. The signals it relies on, based on patents, leaked documentation, and the public guidance from John Mueller and the Search Liaison team, group into four buckets.
- Topical authority. How comprehensively does this site cover its subject? A roofing site with 40 deep pages on roofing beats a general contractor site with two thin roofing pages.
- Link quality, not quantity. A single contextual link from a relevant industry publication outweighs 200 directory links. Google’s link-spam detection has been quietly demolishing low-quality link networks for three years.
- User engagement signals. Click-through rate from search, dwell time, pogo-sticking back to the SERP. Chrome telemetry feeds this. Long-click vs. short-click matters.
- Core Web Vitals. A direct ranking factor since 2021. LCP, INP, CLS — if you fail these on mobile, you cap your ceiling regardless of how strong your links are.
The Bergen County law firm we mentioned earlier
We took on their work for less than half of what the DA-focused agency had quoted. The plan had nothing to do with raising a Moz score.
Month one we rebuilt their practice-area pages — five core practice pages went from 600 words each to 2,400, with FAQ sections, attorney-attributed quotes, and local court references. Month two we shipped Core Web Vitals fixes that dropped LCP from 3.8 seconds to 1.4. Month three we placed two earned-media mentions in legal industry publications — not paid links, actual contributed expert quotes.
By month six their target query traffic was up 84%. Their Moz DA had gone from 24 to 28 — barely moved. The traffic and the leads did not care.
How to optimize for the real signals
Stop staring at the DA score. Start staring at four things — your top-20 query positions in Search Console, your Core Web Vitals report, your time-on-page for the pages Google actually sends traffic to, and the contextual relevance of your inbound links.
If you are going to use a third-party score at all, use it as a relative benchmark against your direct competitors. Not as a target number to chase. “Get our DA to 40” is not a strategy. “Match the topical depth of the three competitors ranking above us on our top five queries” is.
How AJD handles this
We do not report on Moz DA, Ahrefs DR, or SEMrush AS in our client dashboards. We report on actual Google rankings for your tracked queries, organic traffic curves, Core Web Vitals scores, and qualified leads from organic. Those are the numbers your business runs on.
If a current or prospective vendor is selling you on DA increases, ask them to show you the ranking and traffic curves alongside the DA curve from their last three engagements. The gap between the two tells you what you are actually buying.
Domain Authority is a Moz product, not a Google ranking factor. Whether you work with us or not, stop benchmarking your SEO progress against it. Track Google Search Console positions, Core Web Vitals, and qualified leads. Those are the only numbers that pay you.
