Slide 19 of 39
What role does an SEO company play in improving domain authority?
Domain authority is not a Google metric. It is a family of third-party scores, Ahrefs Domain Rating, Semrush Authority Score and Moz Domain Authority, that estimate the strength of a site’s backlink profile. An SEO company raises those scores by earning editorial links and recovering lost link value. Because the score is a proxy, judge the agency on rankings, traffic and leads, with the score as a secondary check.
What Do Domain Authority Scores Measure?
Each tool calculates its own score from its own link index, so the same site gets a different number in each one, and none of them is something Google publishes. When Editorial.link’s 2026 survey asked 518 SEO professionals which domain authority metric they would pick if they could choose only one, the answers split like this:
| Metric | Respondents who would pick it |
|---|---|
| Ahrefs Domain Rating (DR) and URL Rating (UR) | 64.1% |
| Semrush Authority Score | 15.4% |
| Moz Domain Authority (DA) and Page Authority (PA) | 11.6% |
| Majestic CF and TF | 8.9% |
So Ahrefs DR is the score you are most likely to see in an agency report. The survey shows which ruler the industry prefers; it says nothing about whether the ruler predicts rankings.
How Closely Do These Scores Track Rankings?
The relationship is weak. In a January 2025 Ahrefs analysis of the top 1 million US keywords by search volume, the Spearman correlation between ranking position (top 20) and Domain Rating was 0.131, while the number of referring domains correlated at 0.255. Ahrefs itself describes correlations at this level as weak and warns that correlation is not causation.
Two practical readings follow. First, the count of distinct sites linking to a page relates to rankings more closely than the domain-wide score does. Second, a rising DR on its own is not evidence that the agency’s work is reaching the pages that earn you money.
What an Agency Does to Raise Authority
Earning editorial links across the site. Authority work spreads link acquisition across many pages and topics instead of pointing every placement at one URL: a news mention on a research page, a journalist citation on a guide, a resource-page link on a tool. For the tactics themselves, and Google’s rules on paid links, read what link building strategies an SEO company uses.
Distributing authority through internal links. Links earned by external sites do not reach every page automatically. Pages that collect most of the external links should link, in context, to the supporting pages that need strength. On older sites, check for a handful of strongly linked pages that link to almost nothing else; contextual links from those pages are the fix. How an SEO company optimizes website structure explains the hierarchy behind this.
Stopping authority leaks. After a redesign or migration, pages that used to hold external links can return 404s, and redirect chains can stand between those links and the live page. The agency finds URLs that still receive external links but no longer resolve, then redirects each one in a single hop to the live page that covers the same topic. Where no such page exists, the URL is better left returning a 404 or 410: Google’s site move guide warns that redirecting many old URLs to one irrelevant page, such as the home page, might be treated as a soft 404.
Converting unlinked mentions. Sites that already name the brand in articles or roundups can be asked to add a link. Monitoring with Google Alerts or an SEO suite finds the mentions; the request is small because the publisher already chose to cite the brand.
Publishing assets other sites want to cite. Original data, practical calculators and reference tables earn links without a pitch for every placement. For example, imagine a regional HVAC company that publishes an annual table of average repair costs by city: local news sites and bloggers get a number to quote, and each citation links to the same page.
Do Trust Signals on the Site Raise the Score?
Not the third-party score. Author bios, cited sources, an accurate About page and contact details do not change a link-based metric. They matter for a different reason. Google’s guidance on creating helpful, reliable content describes experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness (E-E-A-T) and says: “Of these aspects, trust is most important.” It also states that E-E-A-T “itself isn’t a specific ranking factor”. Treat trust pages as part of making the content credible, not as a lever on DR.
Should a DR Target Go in the Contract?
No. The score depends on links you do not control and correlates only weakly with rankings. Put these in the plan instead:
- A monthly outreach commitment, with a forecast of the new referring domains it should earn from relevant, indexed sites with measurable traffic.
- The pages those links should point to, tied to the queries that drive revenue.
- Rankings and organic leads for those pages, reviewed monthly.
- DR reviewed quarterly, as a lagging check.
There is also a case where authority work is the wrong purchase. Compare your site’s score, and the referring domains of your own page, with the sites and pages ranking for your target queries. If the ranking pages have similar or fewer referring domains and their sites similar or lower DR, links are less likely to be what holds you back; check intent match, content and technical issues first. On a competitive term, measuring that gap is the first step in how an SEO company helps businesses rank for competitive keywords.
How to Judge a Proposal That Leads With DR
Ask three questions: which sites the links will come from, which of your pages they will point to, and how those pages connect to the queries that bring in customers. If the proposal prices links per DR point or promises a DR number by a date, walk away.