How to Increase Your Domain Authority

Domain authority rises when your backlink profile improves: more high-quality links from more unique domains, with fewer low-quality or spammy links pulling the score down. There is no shortcut. But there is a clear order of operations, and some actions move the score significantly faster than others.

Understand what actually drives the score

Before doing anything, check your current baseline. You need to know:

• Your current DA score
• Your referring domain count (unique domains linking to you)
• Your spam score (what proportion of your link profile is low-quality)

Use Crawly's domain authority checker to get all three at once. This is your starting point.

Domain authority is calculated logarithmically. Moving from 10 to 20 takes far less effort than moving from 60 to 70. If you are below 30, almost any quality link will make a visible difference. If you are above 60, the marginal gains require significantly more effort and authoritative links.

1. Earn links from high-authority referring domains

The single biggest lever is the quality and authority of the domains linking to you. One link from a DA 70 site carries more weight than fifty links from DA 10 sites.

Ways to earn high-authority links:

• Original data and research: publish a study, survey, or analysis with specific numbers. Journalists, bloggers, and other sites cite statistics. If you produce the primary source, you collect the citations.
• Linkable tools and resources: free tools, calculators, and templates attract links from anyone who references them. They earn links passively over years.
• Expert contributions: write guest pieces for industry publications with strong DA. One placement on a DA 60+ publication is worth dozens of low-authority guest posts.
• Digital PR: a press release covering a genuinely newsworthy story or data point can generate links from news sites with very high DA scores.
• Broken link building: find pages on high-authority sites with broken outbound links, and offer your content as a replacement. The other site benefits from fixing their link; you get the placement.

2. Diversify your referring domains

Five hundred links from five hundred different domains is far stronger than five hundred links from the same site. Moz weights link diversity heavily.

Check your current referring domain count against your backlink count. If the ratio is heavily skewed (for example, 1,000 backlinks from only 20 domains), your profile lacks diversity. That imbalance limits how far DA can grow regardless of how authoritative those domains are.

Use the bulk DA checker to analyse a batch of referring domains at once and identify where you are concentrated.

3. Remove or disavow toxic links

Low-quality links from high-spam-score domains drag DA down. This is especially true if you have previously been the subject of a negative SEO attack, or if your site is in a niche where link spam is common (finance, legal, health, gambling).

The process:

1. Audit your backlink profile in Moz, Ahrefs, or Semrush
2. Filter for domains with a high spam score (above 60% in Moz)
3. Review each flagged domain manually: does it look like a real site?
4. Compile a disavow file for confirmed toxic links
5. Submit via Google Search Console

See how to build a disavow file for the full walkthrough.

Do not disavow aggressively without manual review. Removing legitimate links by mistake will hurt rather than help.

4. Build internal link equity across your site

Internal linking does not directly increase DA (which is a domain-level metric), but it distributes the link equity you already have more effectively across your pages. This improves the ranking ability of individual pages, which in turn makes your content more likely to be cited and linked to externally.

Key internal linking principles:

• Every important page should be linked from at least three other pages on the site
• Use descriptive anchor text that reflects the topic of the destination page
• Pillar pages should link out to all cluster articles; cluster articles should link back to the pillar
• Orphan pages (pages with no internal links pointing to them) receive no equity and are harder to rank

5. Publish content worth linking to

Passive link acquisition happens when content is genuinely useful and not easily found elsewhere. The content types that attract the most organic links:

• Original research and data (surveys, benchmarks, industry reports)
• Comprehensive guides that become reference resources in a niche
• Free tools that people return to and reference in their own content
• Strong opinion or contrarian takes from credible authors (these attract responses and citations)
• Lists and roundups of resources, tools, or examples that other writers reference

Generic blog posts optimised for keywords but adding nothing new do not attract links. The test: would a journalist or another blogger find this useful enough to reference? If not, it will not earn links organically.

6. Be patient and consistent

DA changes slowly. Moz recalculates it every few weeks, and significant movement requires link profile changes that compound over months, not days.

A realistic timeline for a site starting from scratch:

• Months 1–6: DA 1–20, with active link building
• Months 6–18: DA 20–40, with consistent content and outreach
• Year 2+: DA 40–60, requiring sustained effort and some high-authority placements
• DA 60+: major publications, sustained multi-year investment, significant earned media

Sites that appear to jump quickly are usually benefiting from one high-authority link placement or a successful digital PR campaign. These are achievable, but not reliable as a steady strategy without the content foundation to support them.

Track progress

Check DA monthly, not weekly. Compare:

• DA score (trend direction)
• Referring domains (should be growing steadily)
• Spam score (should be stable or declining)
• Backlink count (less important than domain diversity)

Use the domain authority comparison tool to benchmark against competitors. If your DA is growing but competitors' is growing faster, you need to accelerate link acquisition. If you are matching or outpacing them, the strategy is working.

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Domain authority is an output, not a campaign target. Build the inputs (quality links, strong content, clean profile) and the score follows. Start by checking your current baseline with Crawly's DA checker.