Domain Authority
Is Not an Audience.

What the Score Measures

Moz describes Domain Authority as a prediction of how likely a domain is to rank, on a scale of one to a hundred, computed from its link profile — the number of linking root domains, the number of links, and the authority those links carry. Ahrefs describes Domain Rating in similar terms: the strength of a site's backlink profile relative to every other site in its index, on the same hundred-point scale.

Both are honest about what they are. Neither claims to count readers. Neither is a Google metric — Google has never published a domain-level authority score and has said repeatedly that it does not use one. These are two companies' estimates of link equity, built from two separate crawls of the web, and they are useful for exactly what they measure: how much linking has been pointed at a domain, and from where.

The trouble starts when the number is used as a proxy for something it does not contain. A link seller who leads with "DA 55" is inviting you to read that as "a site with an audience worth DA 55". It is not that. It is a site with links worth DA 55, which may or may not have a single reader.

What It Does Not Measure

It does not measure traffic. It does not measure how many search terms the site ranks for, or how well. It does not measure whether the content is any good, whether it is on your subject, whether the site is maintained, or whether the pages your link would sit on have ever been visited by a person. A domain can carry a high score and be, in every way that matters to a buyer, empty.

The clearest example on this directory is a listing Moz scores at DA 60. Ahrefs scores the same domain DR 0. Semrush reports 4 monthly organic visits, and it ranks for 26 keywords. A buyer who priced that placement on the first number would be paying for the link profile of a site that, by the other three, nobody reads. The listing shows all four figures side by side precisely so that the first one cannot be read alone.

This is not a criticism of Moz. The score is doing its job — the domain does have links pointing at it. The failure is downstream, in the market that decided a link-profile estimate was a price list.

The Scale Is Logarithmic

Both scores are logarithmic, and both vendors say so. Moving from DA 20 to DA 30 is a modest amount of additional linking; moving from DA 70 to DA 80 is enormous. A ten-point difference near the bottom of the scale is trivial and near the top is a different class of site altogether. Two listings at DA 46 and DA 56 are not "ten points apart" in any sense a buyer should price on — the second has something like double or triple the link equity of the first, and the third listing at DA 66 is further again.

Both scores are also comparative rather than absolute. Moz recalculates DA against the whole web; when the top of the web gains links, everyone else's score can drift down without their own profile changing at all. A drop of two points over a quarter usually means nothing happened. That is worth knowing before anyone sells you a "DA increase".

The practical consequence: never compare scores across the range as if the intervals were equal, and never treat a single-digit change as a signal. Read the score as a band — low, mid, high — and then look at the numbers that actually vary between sites in the same band.

Why Moz and Ahrefs Disagree

The two companies crawl the web separately, keep separate link indexes, discount different things, and weight linking domains by their own separate estimate of those domains' authority. For a domain with a large, old, natural link profile the two scores land close together, because both indexes have seen roughly the same links. For a domain whose profile is small, new, or concentrated on a few sources, they can diverge sharply, because one crawl caught what the other missed — or discounted what the other counted.

Across the 84 listings here, Moz DA sits above Ahrefs DR on 56 of 81, by a mean of 8.3 points. On 56 of them the two scores sit more than 12 points apart. That is not two tools being sloppy. It is two tools looking at the same domains and reaching different conclusions about how much of the linking should count, and the systematic direction of the difference is itself information.

When DA runs consistently ahead of DR across a set of sites, the likeliest reading is that the links these sites carry are the kind one index weights and the other discounts. Ahrefs has been explicit that DR is computed from linking domains rather than raw link count, and that it applies its own discounting; the practical effect is that link patterns which move DA — many links from a few places, sitewide links, reciprocal links inside a group — tend to move DR less. The post on spotting a network goes into what those patterns look like from outside. Here, the point is narrower: when the two scores disagree, the disagreement is the finding, and the lower one is the one to plan around.

Authority You Can Buy

Because DA is computed from links, and links can be bought, DA can be bought. This is not a secret and it is not new. An expired domain arrives with the links its previous owner earned. A sitewide footer link from one large site moves the number. A group of domains linking to each other moves all of their numbers at once. None of this requires a reader to exist.

What cannot be bought so easily is a ranking. To rank for a search term a page has to be indexed, be judged relevant, and beat the other pages competing for that term. The count of terms a domain ranks for is therefore a much harder number to inflate than its authority score, which is why it is the number this directory puts beside DA on its listings.

Across the 84 publishers listed, the median domain ranks for 20 organic keywords, and 30 of them rank for ten or fewer. Every one of those 30 carries a Moz DA of 1 or higher. That combination — respectable authority, almost no search footprint — is what bought authority looks like from the outside. It is also the combination that a listing showing DA alone would hide entirely.

The highest DA in the set is 93, on a listing that ranks for 329,054 keywords. Whether that is a good placement depends entirely on what you are buying: a link from a domain with links, or a link a person might follow. The listing gives you both numbers so you can decide which.

What to Read Instead

Four numbers, in this order. First, organic keyword count, because it is the hardest to fake and the most direct measure of whether search engines send anyone to the site. Second, the traffic estimate, read as what it is: Semrush's model of monthly organic visits, built from the rankings it tracks and the search volume behind each one, not a count of readers. Third, traffic divided by keywords, which is how the guide reads that estimate: a site credited with thousands of visits from a dozen ranking terms owes all of it to those dozen, and a guest post published there starts with none of them.

Fourth, and only after the other three, topical fit. A DA 40 site on your subject, with a real readership in your subject, is worth more to you than a DA 60 general-interest site where your article will be the only one on the topic. Google's own guidance on helpful content is written for publishers, but it describes the site you want your link to live on: one with a primary purpose, an audience, and expertise in the subject. Authority scores say nothing about any of that.

What This Means for Price

Most of the guest-post market prices on DA, because DA is one number, everyone has access to it, and it goes up. It is a convenient currency. It is also the reason the market is full of domains that were built to carry a score and nothing else — the incentive is exactly what the pricing model rewards.

A buyer who prices on the four numbers above instead will pay less for the empty domains and more for the ones with readers, which is the right way round. This directory does not publish placement rates — they change, and a stale one is worse than none, which is why every listing says Email for details — but it does publish everything a buyer needs to decide what a placement should be worth to them before asking. The editorial guidelines set out which figures are on every listing and where each comes from.

Read the authority score last. It is a real number about a real thing. The thing is just not the one you are paying for.