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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?

If search engines use Domain Rating as an important ranking factor, why doesn’t Ahrefs include it to the ranking difficulty score?

May avatar
Written by May
Updated over a week ago

There’s no evidence that search engines use Domain Rating (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/.

Ahrefs’ own experiments have shown that the authority of each individual page (its URL Rating) has much higher correlation with Google rankings than the authority of the whole domain.

Eventually, 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.

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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