How to Increase Domain Authority 2025: Everything You Need to Know

If you’re searching for a one-stop guide on how to increase the domain authority of your website, your search ends here.

Domain authority (also known as DA) is a metric developed by Moz that predicts how likely a website is to rank in search results. 

A NEWLY launched website will always start with a Domain Authority score of one, and the DA score will increase as the website gets more quality backlinks over time.

Most authority websites usually have a high DA score because they often have very large numbers of high-quality external links.

High-DA websites generally get first-page rankings with good content. It’s easier to rank for a keyword when you have a site with high DA (when compared to a brand-new site with less DA).  

So if you are looking for practical ways to increase the domain authority of your website in 2025, this detailed guide will help you.

What is domain authority?

Domain Authority (DA) is a search engine ranking score that was originally developed by Moz that predict how well a website will rank on Google search.  The domain authority score ranges from 0 to 100.

You can check your website’s DA score by using the free domain SEO analysis tool by Moz.

Check Your Domain Authority for Free

The current Domain Authority score for our site BloggersPassion.com is 47/100 as shown below:

DA score is also helpful while link building as you can target only those websites with a HIGH DA score. The higher the DA of a website, the more authoritative backlinks it has. 

What is a good domain authority score?

A good Domain Authority (DA) score typically ranges from 50 to 60 for a competitive website. The score ranges from 1 to 100, with higher numbers indicating a greater ability to rank.

Here is the complete table of domain authority scores:

Domain Authority (DA) Score	Description	Explanation
1-10	Very Low	New websites with minimal content or backlinks.
11-20	Low	Basic SEO, still in early growth stages.
21-30	Below Average	Growing sites with limited backlinks.
31-40	Average	Moderate SEO with increasing visibility.
41-50	Good	Solid content and backlink profile.
51-60	Strong	Well-established with growing influence.
61-70	Very Strong	High authority and extensive backlinks.
71-80	Excellent	Industry leaders with substantial reach.
81-90	Elite	Dominant sites with massive traffic.
91-100	World-Class	Top brands with global recognition.

What is page authority?

Page Authority (PA) is a score developed by Moz that predicts how well a web page or URL will rank in search results. The page authority score ranges from 0 to 100. Where higher the score, the greater the ability to rank.

Based on the data from the Moz backlink web index, it calculates Page Authority (PA) which includes backlinks, domain authority, and many other factors. It fluctuates when they update the algorithm that calculates Page Authority (PA). Like Domain Authority (DA), a machine learning algorithm calculates the Page Authority score.

You can check your website’s PA score using Moz’s link explorer tool.

Check Your Page Authority for Free

For example, Our Semrush review post on our blog has a page authority score of 45 out of 100.

Have a look;

The main difference between Moz’s PA and DA scores is that Page Authority measures the ranking strength of a single page, whereas Domain Authority measures the ranking strength of an entire domain or website.

How to Increase Domain Authority Of Your Website in 2025?

Here are some things to consider and follow to increase domain authority in 2025:

• 1. Cover Trending Topics Around Your Niche
• 2. Build Quality & Relevant Backlinks
• 3. Remove Toxic Backlinks
• 4. Create a White Hat SEO Strategy
• 5. Increase the dwell time of your website
• 6. Make Specific External Links Nofollow

1. Cover Trending Topics Around Your Niche

No matter your niche, finding trending topics can help you attract new audiences and boost your overall domain’s authority.

Finding new and trending topics is not rocket science. You can use Google Trends to find trending keywords for your niche.

Here’s a quick step-by-step guide to use Google Trends to find trending topics.

Step 1: Once you’re on Google Trends, enter a keyword or topic related to your niche in the search bar.

Step 2: Once you click on the Explore button, Google Trends will analyze the keyword’s popularity over time, geographic distribution, and related topics.

Here’s what it looks like;

Step 3: Now, it’s time to refine your keywords. You can use filters to narrow down your topic by region, time period (past day, past 7 days, past 1 year, etc), and category.

Step 4: In the final step, look for trending topics. These are keywords with a significant upward trend or those that are currently “hot” in your niche.

Why should you cover trending keywords to improve your domain authority?

If you’re running a brand new website or a domain with less authority, you might be able to rank for popular topics that other websites haven’t written about yet. It ultimately helps your website to appear in search results and become an expert in your niche.

By consistently producing high-quality content on trending topics, you can;

• Attract new visitors to your website (who’re searching for trending topics)
• Attract new backlinks, as other websites may link to your content if the information is helpful and engaging
• Get better user engagement and time on your site
• Position yourself as an expert in your niche
• Expand your website’s topics by covering trending keywords

Above all, trending keywords can help you highly relevant audiences who’re searching for topics that are currently popular.

Make sure to learn how to use Google Trends like a pro. It shows you not only the trending keywords but also similar topics and questions that people are asking.

Here’s an example;

As you can see, Google Trends will also show you;

• Related topics (around your primary phrase)
• Related queries

The above keyword list is enough for you to identify trends and create more relevant content to attract a wider audience.  Additionally, the related queries can help you understand the questions people are asking about these topics.

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2. Build Quality & Relevant Backlinks

Moz MOSTLY considers how many authoritative backlinks a domain (or website) has to determine its DA score.

High-quality backlinks are the most significant factor in increasing the domain authority of a website. Not only quality links can determine your DA score but they’ll also help you with higher search rankings.

So how to get high-quality backlinks in 2025?

Here are a few PROVEN link-building techniques you can use.

Publish guest posts

Guest blogging is the process of writing content for another website. They get FREE content and you get backlinks and traffic. So it’s a win/win approach.

But most people ignore guest blogging because it takes time and effort to find free guest posting websites. If you have a budget, hire the best guest posting service to publish guest posts for you or do it on your own.

Here are a few simple strategies to follow in guest blogging:

• Try to land your guest posts on authoritative sites in your niche. Put your effort into writing amazing content for them. One backlink from an authority site can change the fate of a brand-new blog.
• Use guest posts to grow your email list. In case you don’t get search traffic, your email list can help you generate traffic.
• Connect to the blog owner before you even pitch the topic. For this, comment on their blog posts, reply to their social media posts, and email regularly.
• Once you write for them, promote your guest post like your post.
• Write guest posts that are informative. Try case studies as they often work like a charm.

Run giveaways to build backlinks

We already mentioned backlinks are extremely important for SEO. Most bloggers don’t link to other blogs unless the content is really good.

So how can you easily find link-building opportunities? 

Run giveaways and contests. Yes, contests can be a great marketing strategy to build brand exposure, awareness, and backlinks. 

Here are a few quick tips to run a contest to build backlinks in 2025;

• Giveaway something that everyone wants. You can consider something like a Macbook, an iPad, or an extremely popular tool in your industry (let’s say Semrush for 1 year).
• Ask your participants to write a quick blog post about your contest along with a backlink to your website. This is how you can generate more traffic and links.
• Make it easy for everyone to participate in your contests. For example, you can opt for entrants to submit a 100-word review about your giveaway instead of a 500-word article.
• Set a deadline for your contest. It’s a good idea to run your contest for at least 6 to 8 weeks so you’ll have enough time to promote it and persuade a good number of entrants to participate in your contest. 
• To attract backlinks from high DA websites, give more points to the website owners who give a link back to your site. 

Spy on your competitors

One of the best ways to build links is to analyze your competitors’ backlink profiles. Find out how your competitors are building backlinks along with their sources.

You can easily spy on ANY website’s backlinks using a tool like Semrush.

Semrush offers a tool called Traffic Analytics that helps you easily discover all the top pages that are driving the most traffic to ANY domain. Here’s what it looks like;

Grab Semrush 14-day free trial 

You can then use these backlink sources to grab backlinks for your website as well. 

For instance, if your competitor has a link from a guest post, you can also publish a guest post on that website.  

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3. Remove Toxic Backlinks

Google has various algorithms to punish websites with bad or toxic backlinks. This is usually done by Google to reward sites with high-quality backlinks.

Moz also considers the quality of your website’s backlinks so removing toxic links from your site can help with a higher DA score.

What are toxic backlinks?

Toxic backlinks are the links that come from spammy or low-quality websites. These backlinks could harm your website’s SEO.  

Why remove toxic backlinks?

If Google notices that your blog has a fair number of toxic backlinks, then it punishes your website with poor rankings. It can also lead to a bad backlink profile which ultimately degrades your site’s DA.

If you notice a sudden drop in search traffic, you should first take a look at your website’s backlinks and get rid of toxic backlinks.

Here is how you can remove toxic backlinks:

• Use a site audit tool like Semrush to find and fix your bad backlinks
• Contact the site owners and request them to remove your links
• Use Google’s disavow tool to remove toxic backlinks

If you’re looking for a detailed guide, go through our guide on how to remove bad backlinks which is extremely helpful for beginners. 

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4. Create a White Hat SEO Strategy

If you want to build a solid backlink profile for your website, create a white hat SEO strategy.

White hat SEO refers to all the SEO strategies that function within the rules and guidelines of search engines such as Google.

Implementing a white hat SEO strategy is nothing but getting natural backlinks to your blog. If a high number of pages linked to your blog are relevant to your niche then Google loves to rank your site higher.

How to get natural backlinks?

Content is the king. Write remarkably great content that is not easy to find on other websites. 

You can create insightful posts on controversial topics, in-depth case studies, interviews with experts, or statistics around your industry. You can also try the following methods to build white hat backlinks. 

• Hang out on blogging forums, and events related to your niche and build connections with fellow bloggers. Try to help each other out by linking to each other’s best pages (or blog posts).
• Use sites like Quora. You can pick interesting questions that you can answer and link back to your site.
• Find blog commenting sites. Comment on informative posts by linking to your website.
• If possible, invest in developing a tool, software, or plugin and offer it away for free. If it’s really useful, it will attract a huge number of links.
• Check for broken links and replace your link provided you have a similar type of content.
• Write genuine guest posts to authoritative sites in your niche and include a link to your site.
• Republish the viral posts and link to the original source. There is a possibility that most of the blogs link back to your blog while citing them.

Always remember that quality backlinks help to get quality traffic and to get better rankings really quickly to any website no matter how old or new it is.

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5. Increase the dwell time of your website

Increasing your website’s dwell time and reducing your site’s bounce rates can immensely help you increase your website’s domain authority really quickly.

What is dwell time?

Dwell time is an important On-Page SEO metric that calculates your website’s:

• User Engagement
• Session duration (aka bounce rate) and
• Click through rates (of your search results)

The more people who spend time on your site reading a page (article, infographic, or video) the better rankings it will get.

Dwell time simply means how long your blog visitors are staying on your site without hitting the back button. Google is giving more importance to the sites with better dwell time so your domain authority also increases if you focus on improving your dwell time.

Here are a few powerful tips that you can use to increase the dwell time of your websites:

• Show related posts under every blog post
• Do interlinking regularly and do it wisely
• Open external links in new tabs

Now let’s talk about them in detail.

1. Show related posts under every post

To increase page views and reduce bounce rate, you need to see that users won’t leave your blog after reading the first post. So, what can you do?

Show related posts under every post. You can install a free plugin like Contextual Related Posts to show related posts under your blog posts.

The best way to keep your blog visitors for a long time on your blog is to show related posts at the end of each blog post. So start showing related posts and check the results for yourself.

2. Interlink to your old posts

Interlinking is nothing but linking to your old blog posts. To interlink, focus on targeting the right keywords. If you do it in the right way, you can drive massive traffic to your blog.

What interlinking can do?

• Gets more organic search traffic.
• It helps in ranking better for the desired keywords.
• It increases page views.
• The pages that are linked more often get high domain authority.
• It helps search engines to crawl each and every page.

3. Open external links in new tabs

Opening external links in new tabs can reduce website bounce rates.

If you are a WordPress user, you can use the open external links in a new window plugin.

And make sure to reduce your website’s bounce rates to increase your overall site’s domain authority. Bounce rate is also known as exit rate which is a factor that’s involved in your website’s user behavior.

If someone is leaving your website without clicking on any other page (i.e on their first visit itself), it’s considered a bounce rate. The lesser bounce rate or exit rate your site has the better it is for you to increase your SEO and hence your overall domain authority. So it’s a good idea to always open links in new tabs.

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6. Make Specific External Links Nofollow

Your external links and backlink profile play a VITAL role in improving your domain authority.

According to Moz, external links are the most important source of ranking power.

Have a look at the image below to understand how important backlinks are when it comes to boosting your domain authority.

Here’s another important thing to consider. If you’re giving away too many links to others from your site without actually acquiring new backlinks, it’s very hard to increase the domain authority of your sites. So be smart while linking out to other sites, references, or web pages.

As a rule of thumb, you can use rel=”nofollow” tag whenever you’re linking out to

• Plugins
• Tools
• Affiliate products
• Social media platforms
• Software
• Reviews etc

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Why Is My Domain Authority Dropping?

One of the common questions most people ask is “What should I do if my site’s DA domain authority drops?.”

First things first: domain authority is just a metric, not a ranking factor. Although a good DA score indicates that a website has high-quality links but it doesn’t guarantee first-page rankings.

There are so many instances of sites going from a DA 50 to 30 or even below within a few months and there are also instances where a site with a less DA score gets #1 rankings on Google.

So what can you learn from it?

DA has nothing to do with your search rankings. DA is a search metric developed by Moz (not Google!).

Instead of worrying about why your site DA has dropped, focus more on how to properly optimize your content for your target keywords and attract relevant links. 

That way you can increase your search rankings.

That said, there’s another question most people ask “what’s a good DA and PA?”

There’s no thumb rule on how much DA or PA a site should have but if you preferably have a DA of more than 65, you tend to rank well for most of the keywords you’re aiming to rank for.

The average DA for most “good websites” is 30.  

What’s the bottom line?

Can you outrank your competitors if they have a better DA or PA?

Yes, you absolutely can. It doesn’t matter what your competitors’ DA is. 

By focusing on “long-tail keywords” with less search volume, you can easily beat your competitors even if you have a brand-new site with less DA. The key here is “quality content & user experience”. If they’re good, you’ll get better rankings over time. 

Best Tools For Track Domain Authority

Here’s a list of some of the best tools to improve and track your DA Score:

1. Moz

As you see, Domain Authority developed by Moz is highly regarded for predicting how well a website is likely to rank on SERP.

It offers a comprehensive suite of features that makes it the top choice for content creators, digital marketers, and website owners.

Click here to sign up for the free SEO Chrome extension.

2. Authority Score By Semrush

Authority Score is the Semrush tool’s proprietary metric that scores the overall quality of a domain and its influence on SEO. 

The score is based on the following data;

• number of backlinks
• referring domains
• organic search traffic and more

You can grab Semrush 14-day free trial to check any website’s Authority Score.

2. Ahrefs Domain Rating (DR)

Ahrefs Domain Rating (DR) is equally popular and gives you an overview of the domains with high authority. You can easily find how authoritative a site or domain is by checking the DR which is developed by Ahrefs.

You can check any website’s DR for free by using this tool from Ahrefs.

Currently, BloggersPassion has

• DA from Moz of 47
• DR from Ahrefs of 73

As you can see, there’s a huge difference between metrics from two widely used SEO tools Moz and Ahrefs.

Just like Moz DA, Domain Rating (DR) is also measured on a logarithmic scale from 0 to 100, with the latter being the strongest.

According to Ahrefs, the “logarithmic scale” means that the gap between DR 77–78 is much bigger than the one between DR 27–28. It simply means that the higher your DR gets, the more challenging it will be to grow it by another few points.

Here’s how Ahrefs calculates the DR of a given website.

• Look at how many unique domains have at least 1 do follow link to the target website
• Take into account the DR values of those linking domains
• Take into account how many unique domains each of those websites link to
• Plot these scores on a 0 to 100 scale

The interesting thing about DR is that, if a high DR website links to thousands of other sites, Ahrefs values their links less. But if a low DR website only links to a few sites, Ahrefs considers these links powerful which ultimately helps you get higher DR for your domain.

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Final thoughts on increasing domain authority in 2025

Your backlink profile, content quality, and user experience – all these factors come into play in increasing the domain authority of a website.

So make sure to focus on removing toxic links and try to acquire as many quality links as you can use by using guest posting, blogger outreach, etc.

So what are your thoughts on the domain authority metric developed by Moz? What’s your website’s DA? Did you like our post on increasing domain authority? Have any more questions? Let us know in the comments.

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FAQs On Increasing Domain Authority

Here are a few interesting questions about how to increase domain authority in 2025 and beyond which you might find useful.