Domain Authority is a metric created by the brainboxes over at SEOmoz essentially to try and create a new, more reflective score on how likely a domain is going to be able to rank in Google’s search results. It’s a score that here at Orchid Box we’re much more interested in than the usual Google Page Rank, which is intermittently calculated and significantly less influential than it used to be. That isn’t to say we ignore PR as a metric completely, but we take it more as an indicator than an authoritative score.
The figure goes from 0 to 100, though like page rank it’s an exponential figure so the gap between 50 and 60 is much bigger than the gap between 0 and 10.
So a site such as has a lower Domain Authority of 25, whereas the Google homepage has a somewhat more “authoritative” score of 96.
Domain Authority looks at several metrics within the Open Site Explorer index – which currently stands at 58 billion pages. It’s not a complete index by any stretch of the imagination, but it is pretty much second to the search engines and massive sites such as Alexa, and it contains much more useful information for SEOs than the latter.
Well SEOmoz are nice guys, so they’ve built a superb online tool called which gives you access to this very helpful info and much, much more. What’s more, you can access it for free so head over now!
