Domain Authority vs Domain Rating vs Authority Score

Domain Authority vs. Domain Rating vs. Authority Score

One of the primary selling points of popular SEO tools such as Moz, Ahrefs, and SEMRush are the website authority metrics. These metrics proport to calculate a website’s “authority” based, for the most part, on the quantity and quality of its backlinks.

Website Authority Tools

While these metrics measure roughly the same thing, each tool uses different factors in their calculations which can result in radically different scores.

In this post, we’ll offer a head to head of Domain Authority vs Domain Rating vs Authority Score by first looking at the original authority metric, PageRank. Then we’ll dive into each metric, their individual input factors, and compare the outcomes by looking at our own website’s performance on each.

But first, a short history lesson.

It all Begins with PageRank

What is Google PageRank? This was one of the most important SEO metrics a decade ago. Back then, an update to the PageRank toolbar provided an opportunity to determine if the recent steps you took helped to improve the positioning of the website – and that Google viewed your site as one with more authority. Where does PageRank fit into metrics today?

To understand the value and place of PageRank and authority scores, you need to consider the application in today’s industry and how they may or may not matter to your link building strategy.

What You Should Know About PageRank

PageRank is quite a complex algorithm. It provides a score in a numerical format that is supposed to give you an idea of where your website stands. PageRank is more of a linear representation of that rather than a true way to know how well your website is going to rank in the search engines.

A low score, for example of 0, means that your website is low quality. That often means that it is not seen as an authority website by Google, and as such, Google may not value it high enough to position it high in search engines.

A score of 10, on the other hand, seems like a good figure, and it does indicate that the website is more authoritative than other sites.

What Factors Influence PageRank?

While we know that PageRank is no longer used in the way it once was, there are still some key components of it that do make a difference. For example, things like anchor text and how likely it is that the link will be followed can still play a role in your success.

While Google retired the PageRank Toolbar that was often used to help with this figure, we know that PageRank still matters to some degree. That’s why several other organizations decided to create their own tools to help you better understand how well your website ranks.

Difference Between DA, DR, and AS

When considering website authority scores, you will find a lot of different acronyms out there. It is easy to become overwhelmed with trying to navigate all of your options. Here are some of the explanations you need to do that.

Domain Rating

Domain Rating, DR, is one of the terms you will see readily used. This metric was developed by Ahrefs. It helps to show the strength of your website’s backlink profile. It provides this information on a scale that ranges from 1 to 100. How does Ahrefs determine what this number is?

Key factors that DR uses

To calculate this information, the tool will look at the following:

Referring domains
Link root domains
Domain age
The total number of links

Fanatically Digital’s Domain Rating

Fanatically Digital’s Domate Rating is 39, apparently. Cool.

They have also found 139 unique websites that link to us. Ahrefs relies heavily (if not exclusively) on backlinks in order to calculated their score.

This can be a positive because it keeps things relatively simplified. We know what is being measured. That is, where a website generally stands within the backlink hierarchy of the internet.

However, having only a few variables impacting this score (quantity and quality of links) means it’s more susceptible to spamming and manipulation.

Anyway, let’s see how this compare to what the others found.

Domain Authority

Domain Authority, or DA, is a bit different. It is a Moz calculation. That means it provides a bit of a different source of data. It aims to provide you with insight into how well your website may rank in the search engines.

What factors does DA use?

The age of the domain itself
The spam score it has
The amount of traffic volume the website sees
The total number of backlinks that are on the website
The quality and the quantity of backlinks in comparison to each other
Social signals pointing to the website
The linking root domains

Fanatically Digital’s Domain Authority

Rather than focus exclusively on backlinks, which is what PankRank did, Moz takes things a step further by factoring in performance on search engines.

Domain Authority isn’t merely attempting to mirror PageRank. It’s not trying to gauge the quality of the inputs (i.e. quality of it’s backlinks). It’s using the outputs (i.e. search engine performance) to predict Google’s assessment of authority.

You can see this reflected in Fanatically Digital’s lower Domain Authority, only 22 compared to our 39 Domain Rating. That’s because Moz’s evaluation of our search engine performance is lower than one might expect given our backline profile. Only 44 keywords, according to Moz (although according to Search Console, this metric is off by a factor of 100).

They also take into account our Spam Score, which is only 1% so that’s nice, I guess.

Authority Score

The third option is Authority Score, or AS, which SEMRush designed. It provides a different viewpoint as well. Here, the score is more explicitly a prediction of the overall quality of the webpage or the website itself. It is best used to compare domains.

What factors does AS use?

Your AS is dependent on numerous factors but specifically focuses on these areas:

The link power of the domain. By this, the organization focuses on the quality as well as the number of backlinks for the website.
Organic traffic. The second key factor here is the amount of organic traffic that is coming to your website. This is estimated on a monthly average. Organic traffic stems from people landing on your page from search engine results often thanks to your SEO efforts.
Spam factors. The third factor that plays a significant role in this process is spam. That is, the tool looks for anything that seems spammy and whether or not there is a natural link profile.

To provide some additional insight into Spam Factors, SEMRush shares that there are six key things it does to determine this:

If you get no organic rankings on the search engine results page
Having a super high percentage of do follow domains
Having too many referring domains that come from the same IP address or the same IP network
An imbalance in the amount of organic traffic the website gets compared to the number of links it has
Another domain that has the same (identical even) backlink profile

Fanatically Digital’s Authority Score

While our Domain Rating is a cool 39 and our Domain Authority was a respectable 22, our Authority Score is a meager 5.

These are all out of 100.

As you can probably tell just from these numbers here, SEMRush weighs organic search performance A LOT. Our organic traffic is 0 visitors per month, apparently (also heavily contested by Search Console).

So despite our relatively respectable backlink profile, our Authority Score has been given an F–

This all begs the question, what exactly are these tools purporting to be measuring? And how do we as search marketers or business owners find value in them.

It’s interesting how, over time, these tools try less and less to be mirrors of PageRank, focused exclusively on the quality and quantity of backlines. Instead, they shift further towards an all encompassing SEO score.

Where Do You Stand on the Use of PageRank?

We find that these website authority metrics are a viable bit of information, and all of these versions, AS, DR, and DA, are great tools to have. However, this is just one component of a much larger picture. You cannot determine how well your website is optimized for search engines using these tools. They cannot provide you with enough insight to know what you need to improve either.

The key here is that these scores can be used as a component of an overall marketing strategy but not the total picture. They are merely proxies, and what is worse, they are highly susceptible to manipulation. For that reason, they are often overvalued in today’s use.

Don’t rely on this as the sole component of your marketing campaign. Instead, use it along with the help of a professional organization to customize your marketing strategy.

Comparing Website Authority Scores (DA vs DR vs AS)

By Justin