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Do search engines use domain authority/domain rating as a ranking factor?
Do search engines use domain authority/domain rating as a ranking factor?

Learn about how the domain rating score in Ahrefs is best used for, and what other ranking factors in Google exist.

May avatar
Written by May
Updated over a week ago

There’s no evidence that search engines use Domain Rating ( or similar scores such as Domain Authority, the power of domain, etc) as a ranking factor at all. You can read more about Ahrefs DR here: https://ahrefs.com/blog/seo-metrics/.

Google's own analyst John Mueller has confirmed this by saying that they “don't have anything like a website authority score”. You can find more details here.

In 2016, Google’s Andrey Lipattsev confirmed that backlinks from individual pages are one of Google’s strongest ranking factors. Full list of confirmed Google ranking facotrs can be found here.

At the same time, there is an indirect way of how "domain authority" can influence rankings. A website with a high domain authority (and lots of backlinks pointing to its pages correspondingly) has a lot of “link juice”. 

It can easily pass this link juice to its own pages via internal linking. Therefore, a page that doesn’t have any external backlinks may rank higher only because of internal links that it gets from other pages of its own domain.


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