If youโre 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 a website’s likelihood of ranking in search engine results.ย
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 huge numbers of high-quality external links.
High-DA websites typically achieve first-page rankings with high-quality content. Itโs easier to rank for a keyword when you have a site with high DA (when compared to a brand-new site with less DA).ย ย
If you are looking for practical ways to boost your website’s domain authority in 2025, this detailed guide will provide valuable insights.
Table of Contents
- What is domain authority?
- What is page authority?
- What is a good domain authority score?
- How to Increase Domain Authority Of Your Website in 2025?
- Why Is My Domain Authority Dropping?
- Free Tools For Tracking Domain Authority
- Final thoughts on increasing domain authority in 2025
- FAQs On Increasing Domain Authority
Domain Authority (DA) is a search engine ranking score developed by Moz to predict a website’s ranking in Google search results.ย The domain authority score ranges from 0 to 100.
You can check your websiteโs 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:
A DA score is also helpful when 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.ย
Page Authority (PA) is a score developed by Moz that predicts how well a webpage or URL will rank in search engine results. The page authority score ranges from 0 to 100. The higher the score, the greater the ability to rank.
Based on data from the Moz backlink web index, it calculates Page Authority (PA), which takes into account backlinks, domain authority, and 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 websiteโs PA score using Moz’s link explorer tool.
Check Your Page Authority for Free
Have a look;
The primary difference between Moz’s PA and DA scores is that Page Authority assesses the ranking strength of a single page. In contrast, Domain Authority assesses the ranking strength of a domain. In contrast, Domain Authority assesses the ranking strength of a domain. In comparison, Domain Authority evaluates the overall ranking strength of a domain or website.
A good Domain Authority (DA) score typically ranges from 41 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:
DA Score Range | Rating | Meaning / Insight |
---|---|---|
1โ20 | Low | New or small websites; limited backlinks or authority. Normal for beginners. |
21โ40 | Fair | Growing authority; building quality backlinks and content consistency. |
41โ60 | Good | Strong site with solid SEO foundation and decent link profile. |
61โ80 | Very Good | Established site with high-quality backlinks and strong content presence. |
81โ100 | Excellent | Top-tier authority (e.g., major publishers, global brands). |
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 domainโs authority.
Finding new and trending topics is not rocket science. You can use Google Trends to find trending keywords for your niche.
Hereโs a quick step-by-step guide to using Google Trends to find trending topics.
Step 1: Once youโre 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.
Hereโs what it looks like;
Step 3: Now, itโs 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 appear in search results and establishes you as an expert in your niche.
By consistently producing high-quality content on trending topics, you can;
- Attract new visitors to your website (whoโre searching for trending topics)
- Attract new backlinks by having other websites 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 websiteโs topics by covering trending keywords
Above all, trending keywords can help you reach highly relevant audiences whoโre searching for topics that are currently popular.
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.
Hereโs 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.
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 enhancing a website’s domain authority. Not only can quality links determine your DA score, but theyโll 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 or blog. They receive free content, and you gain backlinks and traffic. So itโs a win/win approach.
However, most people overlook guest blogging because it requires 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 donโt get search traffic, your email list can help you generate traffic.
- Connect with the blog owner before pitching the topic. To do this, comment on their blog posts, reply to their social media posts, and send them emails on a regular basis.
- Once you write for them, promote your guest post as if it were your own.
- Write informative guest posts. Try case studies as they often work like a charm.
Run giveaways to build backlinks
We already mentioned that backlinks are essential for SEO. Most bloggers donโt link to other blogs unless the content is excellent.
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;
- Give away something that everyone wants. You can consider something like a MacBook, an iPad, or an extremely popular tool in your industry (such as Semrush) for a year.
- Ask your participants to write a brief blog post about your contest, including 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. Itโs a good idea to run your contest for at least 6 to 8 weeks, so youโll have enough time to promote it and persuade a good number of entrants to participate.ย
- 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 competitorsโ backlink profiles. Discover how your competitors are acquiring backlinks, along with their sources.
You can easily spy on ANY websiteโs backlinks using a tool like Semrush.
Semrush offers a tool called Traffic Analytics that helps you easily discover all the top pages driving the most traffic to any domain. Here’s what it looks like;
Grab a 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.
3. Remove Toxic Backlinks
Google has various algorithms to punish websites with harmful or toxic backlinks. This is usually done by Google to reward sites with high-quality backlinks.
Moz also considers the quality of your websiteโs 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 websiteโs 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 siteโs DA.
If you notice a sudden drop in search traffic, you should first take a look at your websiteโs 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 that they remove your links
- Use Googleโs disavow tool to remove toxic backlinks
If youโre looking for a detailed guide, consider our comprehensive guide on how to remove bad backlinks, which is extremely helpful for beginners.ย
4. Create a White Hat SEO Strategy
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 operate within the rules and guidelines set by search engines, such as Google.
Implementing a white-hat SEO strategy is essentially about acquiring 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 develop white-hat backlinks.ย
- Participate in blogging forums and events related to your niche to build connections with fellow bloggers. Try to help each other out by linking to each otherโs 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 give it away for free. If itโs beneficial, it will attract a vast number of links.
- Check for broken links and replace them with similar content, provided you have a suitable replacement.
- 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 high-quality backlinks help drive quality traffic and achieve better rankings quickly, regardless of a website’s age or newness.
5. Increase the dwell time of your website
Increasing your websiteโs dwell time and reducing your siteโs bounce rate can significantly help you boost your websiteโs domain authority quickly.
Dwell time is a crucial On-Page SEO metric that calculates your websiteโs:
- User Engagement
- Session duration (aka bounce rate) and
- Click-through rates (of your search results)
The more people spend time on your site reading a page (article, infographic, or video), the better its rankings will be.
Dwell time refers to the duration that your blog visitorsย stayย on your site without navigating away using the back button. Google is giving more importance to 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 discuss them in detail.
1. Show related posts under every post
To increase page views and reduce bounce rate, you need to ensure that users wonโt 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 simply linking to your existing 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 can interlinking do?
- Gets more organic search traffic.
- It helps in ranking better for the desired keywords.
- It increases page views.
- The pages that are linked to more often tend to have a high domain authority.
- It helps search engines 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 theย Open External Links in a New Windowย plugin.
Also, ensure that you reduce your websiteโs bounce rate to enhance your overall domain authority. Bounce rate, also known as exit rate, is a factor involved in your websiteโs user behavior.
If someone leaves your website without clicking on any other page (i.e., on their first visit), itโs considered a bounce rate. The lower the bounce rate or exit rate of your site, the better it is for you to increase your SEO and, consequently, your overall domain authority. So it’s a good idea to always open links in new tabs.
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 essential backlinks are when it comes to boosting your domain authority.
Hereโs another essential thing to consider. If youโre giving away too many links to others from your site without actually acquiring new backlinks, itโs tough to increase the domain authority of your site. Be cautious when linking to other sites, references, or web pages.
As a rule of thumb, you can use the rel=โnofollowโ tag whenever youโre linking out to:
- Plugins
- Tools
- Affiliate products
- Social media platforms
- Software
- Reviews etc
If your score is dropping, donโt panic; itโs a normal occurrence that can happen for many reasons. Here are some simple ones:
- Other sites got better:
Think of it like a class ranking; even if you didnโt do worse, others may have improved their websites, causing your score to drop slightly. - You lost backlinks:
If websites that were linking to yours deleted your links or those sites got weaker, your DA can fall. - Low-quality or spammy links:
If you obtain backlinks from fake or low-quality sites, they can harm your DA instead of benefiting it. - Youโre not adding new content:
If you havenโt posted fresh, helpful content in a while, your site may appear less active or credible. - Technical issues:
Things like slow site speed, broken pages, or poor mobile experience can make your site look weaker.
So what can you learn from it?
DA has no impact on your search rankings. DA is a search metric developed by Moz (not Google!).
Instead of worrying about why your site’s DA has dropped, focus more on how to properly optimize your content for your target keywords and attract relevant links.ย
That way, you can increase your search rankings.
That said, thereโs another question most people ask: โWhatโs a good DA and PA?โ
Thereโs no thumb rule on how much DA or PA a site should have, but if you prefer to have a DA of more than 65, you tend to rank well for most of the keywords youโre aiming to rank for.
The average DA for most โgood websitesโ is 30.
Whatโs the bottom line?
Can you outrank your competitors if they have a better DA or PA?
Yes, you absolutely can. It doesnโt matter what your competitors’ DA is.
By focusing on โlong-tail keywordsโ 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 โquality content & user experienceโ. If theyโre good, youโll get better rankings over time.
Hereโs a list of some of the best tools to improve and track your DA Score:
1. Moz
As you can see, Domain Authority, developed by Moz, is highly regarded for predicting how well a website is likely to rank on SERPs.
It offers a comprehensive suite of features that make it the top choice for content creators, digital marketers, and website owners.
Click here to sign up for the free SEO Chrome extension.
Authority Score is the Semrush toolโs 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 a Semrush 14-day free trial to check any websiteโs Authority Score.
2. Ahrefs Domain Rating (DR)
Ahrefs Domain Rating (DR) is equally popular and provides an overview of domains with high authority. You can easily find how authoritative a site or domain is by checking the DR, which is developed by Ahrefs.
This Ahref metric I always keep in mind when evaluating my target site for building Backlinks.
You can check any websiteโs DR for free by using this tool from Ahrefs.
Currently, BloggersPassion has
- DA from Moz of 46
- DR from Ahrefs of 73
As you can see, thereโs a vast 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, ranging from 0 to 100, with the highest value being the strongest.
According to Ahrefs, the โlogarithmic scaleโ means that the gap between DR 77โ78 is much bigger than the one between DR 27โ28. It simply means that the higher your DR becomes, the more challenging it will be to increase it by a few more points.
Hereโs how Ahrefs calculates the DR of a given website.
- Examine the number of unique domains that have at least one 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 links 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 its links less. However, if a low DR website only links to a few sites, Ahrefs considers these links powerful, which ultimately helps you achieve a higher DR for your domain.
Your backlink profile, content quality, and user experience are all factors that contribute to increasing the domain authority of a website.
Ensure that you focus on removing toxic links and strive to acquire as many high-quality links as possible through guest posting, blogger outreach,ย and other relevant strategies.
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.
Here are a few interesting questions about how to increase domain authority in 2025 and beyond, which you might find helpful.
To find accurate DA, you need to installย MozBar. Itโs a free browser extension that shows you the DA of any site whenever you visit it.
Domain Authority (DA) is calculated by evaluating multiple factors, including linking root domains and the total number of links, into a single DA score.
There are 3 best ways to increase your siteโs DA.
โ Earn high-quality links
โ Publish related trending topics
โ Remove bad links
Page Authority (PA) is a metric developed by Moz that helps you estimate a page’s ability to rank.
Page Authority (PA) measures the predictive ranking strength of a single page, whereas Domain Authority (DA) measures the overall strength of an entire domain or subdomain.
Hello Anil,
Fabulous Post. I have completed my one year of blogging in October 2017. In the beginning of my blog I thrive to increase my Domain Authority. However I am able to put my DA above 20. These are some proven tips and works great for me. Longer content performs really well in Search engines and it also increase user engagement. Thanks for sharing these great and informative insights.
Have a great Day ๐
Vishwajeet
Thanks for sharing this blogs it is very helpful for my website to increase DA
Hi dear,
All the basics and advanced tips you shared, Actually it will helpful for all. I agree with you that Clean backlinks profile increase the DA but if we focusing on only quality links, the search engine will know us as a robot, so we strongly recommended some low-quality links to leave no footprints. maybe I am wrong.
Thanx for kind info
Thanks for the great information, i been trying to increase DA to my website (Forever) the free way, i think; i have to many links that are no follow, so iโam not seeing a increase in DA, but thanks for some great knowledge, it was needed
Thanks for this informative and helpful post. I need to increase my website DA. I think this post will help me a lot. Thank you dude!
Domain Authority is really important. Better DA means better SERP. It depends lot of factors as you have mentioned and yes, we need to take care of all these things and get higher DA.
Thanks for the informative post Anil.
Actually i had started blogging 4 months ago only and most SEO terms i know but only 1 week ago i knew about DA when i used MOZ open site explorer tool. Till now i donโt know the importance of DA in SEO but this article is quite helpful for me, so thanks
My website is related new (less than 6 months old), and doesnโt have too many backlinks. It has a DA=14.34, and PA=19.28. How bad is that?
Iโm thinking to actively do some SEO
Regards
Kabir
I want to increase my domain autority , i will try some of your advice . Thank you !
Hi Anil,
Improving overall blogs SEO really helps website’s domain authority, as you said quality link building is important to increase the domain authority, loading time is one of the factor for better user experience, i agree with you, every should keep all these in their mind, to get higher domain authority for their blogs, thank you for sharing this article.
Hi Harsh,
Thanks for the nice article. I agree to you that after Google stopped updating PR, alexa and Moz have become the premier site to check the status for any stats.
Thanks for sharing!!
-Ashutosh