Free Domain Authority Checker: Moz DA Plus 4 Link Metrics

Domain Authority is Moz's metric, so every legitimate way to see it traces back to Moz's index. What differs is how much context you get with the number, and how many domains you can run.

The habit worth breaking is checking a single number in isolation. A DA on its own is unreadable: you cannot tell whether 41 is the result of five years of steady editorial links or a burst of paid placements last spring, and those two domains behave completely differently from here. That is why the checker above returns the spam score, MozRank and both link counts in the same view, and why it draws the score's history rather than just today's value.

Domain Authority is a 0–100 score built by Moz that predicts how likely a domain is to rank in search results. It is calculated from Moz's own crawl of the web — principally the number of distinct domains linking to you and how authoritative those linking domains are in turn.

Three properties of the score matter more than its definition:

It is Moz's model, not Google's. Google does not publish an authority score, does not consume DA, and will not rank you better because your DA rose. Moz built DA to approximate how Google appears to treat link authority. It is a weather forecast, not the weather.

It is logarithmic. The scale is deliberately crowded at the bottom and sparse at the top, because that is how the link graph is actually distributed. Going from 20 to 30 is ordinary work; going from 70 to 80 means acquiring links at a scale most sites never reach. A one-point gain at the top is worth far more than a ten-point gain at the bottom, which is why "we grew DA by 10" means nothing without saying from where.

It is scored relatively. DA is normalised against the rest of Moz's index. If the web around you gains links and you stand still, your score can fall while nothing about your site got worse. This is the single most misread property of the metric, and it is behind most "my DA dropped and I did nothing" reports.

There is no absolute answer, and any page that gives you one — 40 is good, 50 is excellent — is selling you a threshold that does not exist. DA is only meaningful compared against the domains you are competing with for a specific query.

The useful version of the question is: how does my DA compare to the sites currently ranking for the keyword I want? Run the top three results through the checker, then read your own number against theirs.

That last row is the interesting one and the most common. A domain with more authority than everyone ranking above it does not have a link problem — it has a relevance, intent-match or technical problem on the specific page. More links will not fix it, and months spent on outreach will be months wasted.

The checker returns four numbers alongside DA. Each answers a question the score alone cannot.

Spam Score is the share of sites with a similar link profile that Google has penalised. It is a resemblance measure, not an accusation: a 5% spam score is unremarkable, while 30% means your profile looks structurally like profiles that got hit. Read it before DA when you are evaluating someone else's domain, because a high DA with a high spam score is the classic signature of a domain inflated on purpose.

MozRank is a logarithmic 0–10 link-popularity score. It weights the authority flowing to the domain rather than the breadth of it, so it is a useful tie-breaker: two domains at DA 45 where one has MozRank 4.1 and the other 2.8 are not equivalent.

Linking domains and inbound links are the two counts that actually build the score, and the ratio between them is the most useful thing on the panel. Divide inbound links by linking domains:

• A low ratio — a few links per domain — indicates broad editorial coverage. Many separate sites decided to link to you once.
• A high ratio — hundreds of links per domain — usually means site-wide placements: footer links, sidebar widgets, template links, or a directory that links from every page. These inflate the link count while adding little authority.

A domain reporting 400,000 inbound links from 300 linking domains is not 400,000 links strong. It has 300 relationships and a lot of templates. This one division tells you more about a link profile than the DA does, and it takes two seconds.

DA follows your backlink profile, so the honest answer is that you improve it by earning links from relevant, credible domains — and that this is slow, because Moz has to refresh its index before anything you earned shows up.

What most people get wrong is the order of operations. Two things pay off before outreach does:

Stop losing the authority you already have. 36.1% of the sites our audit engine has crawled are serving 4xx on internal links. Every broken internal link is authority arriving at a dead end, and it costs nothing to fix compared to earning a new link. A free site audit finds them in one pass.

Clean up what is dragging the profile down. Links from spam networks and scraped directories get discounted by Moz and can raise your spam score. Finding and disowning them is unglamorous and often moves the number more than a new placement would — our guide to finding spammy backlinks and the backlink audit walkthrough cover the process.

Only then does link acquisition become the constraint, and the mechanism there has not changed: other sites link to work they have a concrete reason to cite. Original data, a tool, a genuinely better explanation. Optimising content for the query it targets makes the page rank; making it worth citing is what makes the links happen.

Note what is not on this list: buying links, DA-boosting packages, expired-domain redirects, and private blog networks. These move the number in the short term precisely because they exploit the model, and they show up in the spam score while carrying real risk from Google — which does not measure DA at all, but does measure link schemes.

This is the most common frustration with the metric, and it almost always has a mundane explanation. Match your symptom:

The first row catches the majority of cases. If a partner site links to you from twelve new articles, your inbound-links count jumps by twelve and your linking-domains count does not move at all — and DA is driven far more by the second. Growth in inbound links without growth in linking domains is not authority growth.

The second row is a patience problem, not a problem. Moz recalculates on its own schedule, so a link earned this week may not register for weeks. This is exactly what the history line is for: it shows you the shape of the score over time, which is the only way to distinguish a genuine plateau from a lag.

Not directly, and it never did — but the underlying signal it estimates still counts. AI answer engines cite sources, and the sources they reach for skew heavily toward pages that already rank well in classic search. A domain that no one links to rarely ranks, and a page that does not rank is rarely cited.

The more actionable point is that authority is no longer sufficient on its own. 54.6% of the sites our audit engine crawls fail its AI/GEO readiness category — no llms.txt, AI crawlers blocked by default, weak semantic HTML. A domain can have every link it needs and still be invisible to the engines doing the citing, because it never made its content machine-readable. If AI visibility is the goal, DA is not the metric to watch; a GEO audit is.

Four honest limits, so you know when to reach for something else.

Which links produce the score. You get counts, not the list. To see the actual referring domains, their anchor text and the pages they point at, run the free backlink checker or use Backlink Explorer on the paid platform.

Anything about individual pages. DA is domain-level. A strong domain can carry a weak page, and rankings are won by pages — check a specific URL with the page authority checker instead.

What Google thinks. This is Moz's estimate of link authority. It correlates with ranking ability; it is not a ranking factor and no amount of it guarantees a position.

Whether your site is technically able to rank. Authority is one input. Crawlability, indexation, rendering and speed are others, and they fail far more often — a full site audit covers the rest.

Source for the audit-engine figures above: SEOmator audit and crawling data, January–July 2026 (100K+ websites audited, 50M+ pages crawled).