The authority that search engines give you has a significant influence on whether you have successful SEO or not. But what exactly is authority? And how does Google evaluate it? In this article, we explain the different types that exist and how you can efficiently improve them.
Table of Contents
PageRank
As an introduction to the subject, it is essential first to talk about what PageRank (PR for short) is. This is the algorithm created by Google to measure the authority of websites. It was named after its inventor, Larry Page, who is also one of the founders of Google.
Although for a long time PageRank was used by webmasters and SEOs to gauge the quality of sites, it is no longer a public metric. PageRank is still a valuable part of Google’s internal algorithm, but today we need to use other parameters to understand the authority of a website.
Types of Authority
We must differentiate between two different types of authority that we can find in SEO.
- Domain or website authority
- Page authority
Let’s take a look at each of them in detail.
Domain authority
To begin with, what is domain authority?
Domain authority, also known as website authority, is an SEO concept that represents how much “strength” a site has to rank in search engines. This term can be easily confused with the Domain Authority (DA) metric developed by Moz. It’s essential to keep in mind that the concept and the metric are two different things, more on that below.
How Search Engines evaluate DA
That said, how do search engines evaluate the strength, or the domain authority, of your site?
Just as a librarian would recommend one book over another, search engines also rank websites according to their quality, popularity, and trustworthiness. If you consider the value of a book depending on the quality of its pages, it’s easy to understand that domain authority depends mainly on the sum of the authority given to each individual page.
Trustworthiness
If we go a little deeper into this, search engines consider a website reliable when it has an excellent track record. There are many factors at play, but broadly, it means the site has been offering valuable content since it was published and has received minimal Google penalties. Websites that have demonstrated good behavior for the longest time are worthy of gaining the trust of search engines. New sites, by contrast, have to work harder to earn that trust.
Popularity
How do search engines know if your website is popular? By how often it gets linked to and talked about elsewhere.
The more people talk about you, the more popular you are, right? But not all external links are equally beneficial for your domain and page authority. Depending on the quality of the backlinks, you’ll get more or less “power,” and if a website linking to you is considered low quality or spammy, it can even damage your authority.
In short, good popularity comes from having as many backlinks as possible from high-quality websites. For the full picture on how to earn those links properly, see our guide on Link Building.
How can I check my domain authority?
One way to see the status of your domain authority is to check whether you’re ranking for high-volume search queries. High-quality external links have a direct impact on your authority too, so it’s worth finding out how many backlinks you have and where they come from. Are they from a range of different, reliable websites?
A few tools let you see an estimated authority score. Worth being clear upfront: none of these come directly from Google. They’re third-party estimates, each built from that vendor’s own crawl of the web, which is why the same site can show different numbers across different tools. They’re useful for relative comparison, not as an exact figure Google itself uses. Most run on a scale from 0 to 100, and whichever you use, a higher score is generally better.
Moz Domain Authority (DA): the original and still the most widely recognized name in this space, Moz predicts your website’s ranking potential based on its link profile.
Ahrefs Domain Rating (DR): Ahrefs’ own website authority metric. The higher a website’s score, the more authoritative it’s considered.
Semrush Authority Score: a blended metric that combines link data with organic traffic and spam signals, rather than looking at links alone, which makes it useful for a broader quality check on a domain.
Majestic Citation Flow, Trust Flow, and Topical Trust Flow: three related metrics worth knowing. Citation Flow measures the sheer volume of links pointing to a site. Trust Flow reflects the quality of those links, based on how trustworthy the linking sites and pages themselves are. Together they form Majestic’s Flow Metrics. Topical Trust Flow goes further, showing a site’s relative influence within a specific topic or category, which is useful when relevance matters as much as raw authority.
How can I improve my domain authority?
Considering that search engines give more authority to websites with higher quality, popularity, and reliability, you almost have the answer already.
- Publish high-quality content regularly that matches what your users are actually searching for.
- Earn the trust of search engines through good on-page SEO practice and avoiding Google penalties.
- Get as many backlinks as possible from valuable, relevant websites. See our Link Building guide for how to actually go about earning them.
Page Authority
Now it’s time to ask, what is Page Authority, or PA?
Page Authority is a concept very similar to domain authority, with one key difference. While DA indicates a domain’s overall “strength” to rank organically, PA reflects the same idea, but for one particular page.
What is the Page Authority useful for?
Page Authority indicates how well a particular page can be expected to rank. It’s handy for knowing whether your content strategy is working, since you can start to see which topics your audience actually responds to. You can also spot whether specific underperforming pages might be dragging down the authority of the whole site.
Compare your pages with more and less authority. What does the page that performs well have that the low-scoring one doesn’t? Look closely and learn from the difference, it’s genuinely useful signal for improving future pages.
This also lets you evaluate whether the backlinks pointing to a specific page are actually good quality or genuinely helpful for your rankings, since you can see the authority of the pages linking in.
How can I improve my Page Authority?
Since Page Authority is the same underlying concept as Domain Authority, just focused on one page instead of the whole site, it’s no surprise we’re back to talking about quality and popularity.
Fresh, quality content
Google likes to see up-to-date content that actually answers what users are searching for. Provide high-quality information on a regular basis that genuinely interests your target audience. A site with only old, stale content will see its Page Authority suffer, and don’t forget to optimize content for both users and search engines, not just one or the other.
Popularity
As covered above, backlinks demonstrate popularity. You want as many as possible from websites relevant to your industry specifically. The more quality external links pointing to a page, the more authority it earns.
How can I check the Page Authorithy?
To understand where a page stands, ask a few questions. Is it ranking for a high-volume search query? How many backlinks does that specific page have, and are they high quality?
You can check Page Authority scores using the same tools listed for domain authority above: Moz, Ahrefs, Semrush, and Majestic all offer a page-level equivalent alongside their domain-level score.
Authority isn’t only about links
Everything above centers on links, which is accurate for how Domain and Page Authority specifically work. But it’s worth knowing that authority as a broader concept in SEO has expanded beyond pure link counting.
Topical and entity authority reflect how strongly a search engine associates your site, or even a specific author, with real expertise in a given subject, independent of raw link counts. This ties closely to E-E-A-T, Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness, the framework that’s become central to how Google evaluates content quality, including in the core updates that periodically reassess it across the web.
In practice, this means a smaller site with genuine, demonstrated expertise in a narrow topic can carry real authority within that topic, even without the sheer backlink volume of a much larger, more general site. Link-based authority and topical authority reinforce each other, but they’re not the same thing, and it’s worth thinking about both.
Does authority affect AI search visibility?
Increasingly, yes, though not in exactly the same way. When an AI system like ChatGPT or Perplexity decides which sources to cite in an answer, it weighs signals that overlap significantly with traditional authority, trustworthiness, demonstrated expertise, and how reliable a source has been over time, even if it isn’t running the same link-based calculation a tool like Ahrefs or Moz does.
Building genuine authority through quality content and real backlinks still matters here, it’s just one part of a broader picture that also includes technical crawlability and how citable your content actually is. See our guide on AI Search Optimization for the fuller picture.
There’s no universal target, since the scale is relative to each tool’s own index. A more useful comparison is against sites actually ranking for the queries you care about. If you’re well below them, link building is probably your bottleneck, if you’re level with them, content and relevance likely matter more.
Each tool crawls the web independently and builds its own link graph, so they’re working from different data and different formulas. Pick one tool and track it consistently over time rather than comparing scores across tools directly.
Not immediately. Authority builds over time through a track record of quality content and earned backlinks, so new sites generally need to work harder to catch up to established competitors, even with genuinely excellent content.
Not directly. Social shares don’t pass link equity the way backlinks do, though content that gets shared widely often ends up earning genuine backlinks as a result, which is where the real authority benefit comes from.
No. Domain Authority is a third-party Moz metric, not something Google uses internally. It’s a useful estimate that correlates reasonably well with ranking potential, but Google has never confirmed using DA, DR, Authority Score, or any equivalent third-party metric directly.
