Domain Authority and Page Authority explained: what actually matters

By Reckona AIUpdated 28 July 20267 min read

Few SEO metrics get obsessed over as much in India as DA and PA — sellers advertise 'DA 50+ backlinks,' buyers filter agencies by promised DA growth. Here's the part most of that conversation leaves out: Google doesn't use either metric.

What DA and PA actually are

Domain Authority and Page Authority are proprietary scores created by Moz (other tools like Ahrefs have their own similar metrics, e.g. Domain Rating) to estimate how likely a site is to rank, based on its link profile. They're a third-party prediction, calculated by a private company — not a number Google calculates or uses in its own ranking algorithm.

What they're still useful for

A rough proxy for link quality when evaluating a potential backlink source — a very low-DA site is often (not always) lower quality.
Competitive benchmarking — comparing your score's trend against direct competitors over time.
A shorthand in vendor conversations — useful as a common reference point, as long as everyone understands its limits.

Why "DA 50 backlinks for sale" is a red flag

Because DA is gameable and doesn't directly influence rankings, a service selling links purely for DA numbers is optimizing for a vanity metric, not actual ranking improvement. A backlink from a relevant, real site with modest DA often helps rankings more than one from an irrelevant high-DA site built purely to inflate the score.

What to track instead

Metric	Why it matters more
Actual keyword rankings	Directly reflects what you're trying to achieve
Organic traffic and conversions	The outcome that actually pays bills
Referring domain relevance	Whether links come from genuinely related, real sites

Use DA as one weak signal among many, never as the goal itself. A vendor promising DA growth as the primary deliverable is optimizing for the wrong number.

The full build

See our digital PR and link building guide and what backlinks actually are for the fuller picture.

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