How to increase domain authority: what moves it

The companies behind these scores agree on one thing: do not chase the number. Ahrefs says increasing the score itself "shouldn't be your primary focus", and Moz, which created Domain Authority, calls raising it for its own sake "pointless vanity". The score follows the links, so this page is about the links.

What actually moves domain authority

Link-based scores rise for broadly the same reasons, and Ahrefs spells out its own:

• More linking websites. Its rating counts sites, not links: "subsequent links from the same website won't improve a site's DR since we count referring domains and not backlinks."
• Followed links. Ahrefs counts only followed links; links with ugc, sponsored and nofollow attributes "won't improve DR".
• Stronger linking sites. A link from a high-rated site lifts you more, and keeps lifting you as that site grows.
• Sites that link out sparingly. The more sites a domain links to, the less each of its links passes on.

Moz adds two weights: links from sites with real traffic count for more, and spammy links are discounted. Nothing done on your own site moves a link-based score directly. And the scale is logarithmic: in Ahrefs' words it is "much more challenging to go from DR 69-70 than 9-10".

The levers, in order

1. Publish pages worth citing

Ahrefs puts it bluntly: "People are more likely to link to pages that aren't just about making you money," which is why sales pages rarely earn links. What earns them is utility, such as free tools and calculators, and citability, such as original statistics and studies. Depth on one subject gives other sites more to cite and builds topical authority too, and a steady content velocity keeps adding to it.

2. Earn links from relevant sites

Good pages are not discovered on their own, because "nobody can link to content that they don't know exists." Tell the people most likely to cite you: sites you mention, writers who cover the same topic, and sites that linked to similar pages. The page on how to get backlinks that count covers the tactics that work for a small site.

3. Concentrate authority with internal links

The pages that attract links are rarely the ones you most need to rank, so Ahrefs advises using internal linking to pass that authority on, from your most-cited pages to the ones that matter commercially. Ordinary internal links do this, and they are the cheapest lever here.

4. Keep linked pages alive

Links point at URLs. Delete, merge or move a page without a redirect and the links pointing at it lead to an error page. Before any content pruning, check which pages other sites link to, and redirect a removed page to its closest equivalent.

5. Clean up only what is clearly manipulative

Low-authority links are not the problem: Moz notes it is "perfectly natural to have some links from low-authority domains and pages." Clean up only links plainly built to game rankings, such as paid links or a network you joined.

What does not work

Some apparent levers do nothing, and some work against you.

• Directory and bookmark links in bulk. Google's spam policies list "low-quality directory or bookmark site links" as link spam. A handful of relevant business listings is fine; hundreds are not.
• Forum, comment and profile links. Usually marked nofollow or ugc by the host, so they do not count toward a score built on followed links.
• Bought links. Google's list of link spam starts with "buying or selling links for ranking purposes". Moz's advice to anyone buying links priced by DA is to spend the money "on something more useful, like sandwiches."
• Exchanges, networks and farms. Google also names "excessive link exchanges" and "creating low-value content primarily for the purposes of manipulating linking and ranking signals".

The cost is more than wasted money. Google says sites that violate its spam policies "may rank lower in results or not appear in results at all", and Moz builds its score to discount bad links, so links like these may not lift it in the first place.

What to expect at each stage

Judge progress against sites at your own stage, not against the leaders. In a sample of 55 domains we measured on 2026-10-02 (counted in the index our checker uses), sites rated DR 20 to 39 by Ahrefs had a median of 240 referring domains, DR 40 to 59 sites 716, and DR 60 to 79 sites 1,561: roughly two to three times as many linking sites per band. The page on what counts as a good domain authority shows whether your number is normal for your stage.

How long does it take

No vendor publishes how fast its score moves, so any promised date is a guess. Three things are known.

The score moves only after a tool's crawler finds and counts your new links, so it always lags the work.

The evidence on timing is about rankings, and it is measured in months. Ahrefs polled its audience, and the typical answer from 3,680 respondents was three to six months for SEO to show results. Ahrefs also reports Google's John Mueller saying it could take up to a year for Google to work out where to rank a new site.

A year of good work moves a new domain a modest distance. In Semrush's year-long study of new domains, the best 10 percent ended the year at an average domain authority of 20.3 on Semrush's scale, while the group as a whole averaged under 10.

So plan in quarters, re-check your domain rank monthly, and read the trend rather than any single check. While the number grows, the work that pays is choosing keywords your current authority can already win, so that traffic does not wait for links.

How Structura handles this

Structura does not build links, so it cannot raise the number directly. It does no outreach, buys no links and places none on other sites; the links that move the score come from other people choosing to cite you, or from link work you or your PR do.

What it does is the rest of this page. On paid plans, each post is researched against what already ranks, cites sources you approve and, with internal linking switched on, links into your existing posts, so authority reaches the pages that need it. Keywords are picked under a difficulty ceiling set from your site's strength, so the site earns search traffic while its authority grows rather than after. The free tools on this site, the checker included, are the kind of linkable asset the first lever describes. The blog SEO software page shows how keywords are matched to a site's strength.

FAQ