News Courtesy of Moz.com:
The Short Version: Don't obsess over Domain Authority (DA) for its own sake. Domain Authority shines at comparing your overall authority (your aggregate link equity, for the most part) to other sites and determining where you can compete. Attract real links that drive traffic, and you'll improve both your Domain Authority and your rankings.
Unless you've been living under a rock, over a rock, or really anywhere rock-adjacent, you may know that Moz has recently invested a lot of time, research, and money in a new-and-improved Domain Authority. People who use Domain Authority (DA) naturally want to improve their score, and this is a question that I admit we've avoided at times, because like any metric, DA can be abused if taken out of context or viewed in isolation.
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Since I’ve started seriously investing time and effort into link building, I’ve noticed many SEO’s put a lot of weight on DA and PA. At first, I did as well. However, I’ve shifted over to majestic’s Trust Flow and Citation Flow as a better gauge of website authority. Still, the most important statistic that I look for when seeking out guest post opportunities is the organic traffic of a website.
I’m not a Google engineer, but it definitely seems like organic traffic on a site with a DA of 20 is more valuable than a site with DA of 50 and little to no organic traffic. I always research traffic via SimilarWeb when looking at websites for a potential backlink. If that site doesn’t register any traffic on the SimilarWeb platform, it’s not worth my time. I don’t care what the DA is.
While Domain Authority is certainly useful, it’s not the end-all-be-all of domain metrics. Why? Because that information can be skewed. There are a lot of websites that claim popularity due to their high DA but, in fact, get very little real traffic. Compare that to a website that has a lot of organic keywords listed in Google which leads to organic traffic and you’ll understand why that matters more.
A tool like SE Ranking allows you to plug in any domain and view historical information concerning the number of organic keywords in a particular month. Using this information along with SimilarWeb’s estimated traffic is a good indicator of truly how popular a website is. If you think about it logically, sites with many organic keywords listed have earned trust with Google. Trust, in the eyes of Google, is extremely important in keyword rankings. Therefore if these trusted websites are linking to yours, that will not only boost the DA/PA but also potentially get you more referral traffic.