DA PA Checker: What Your Domain Authority Score Really Means (and What It Doesn’t)

Domain Authority (DA) is a score from 1 to 100, created by the SEO company Moz, that predicts how likely a whole website is to rank in search results. Page Authority (PA) does the same job for one individual page instead of the whole domain. Both scores are worked out mainly from the site’s link profile — how many other sites link to it, and how strong those linking sites are.

Neither score comes from Google. That single fact explains most of the confusion around DA checkers — and a fair amount of the nonsense too. Before you type your domain into the next tool that promises a number, it’s worth knowing what it is, what it isn’t, and why the genuine one is so hard to get for free.

What DA and PA Actually Measure

Moz built these scores as a prediction, not a verdict. DA looks at your entire domain — every page, every link pointing anywhere on the site — and rolls it into one figure. PA zooms in on a single URL, so your homepage, which tends to collect the most links, usually carries the highest PA on your site, while a brand new post starts near the bottom and climbs as it earns links of its own.

A page can punch above its site’s weight, too: a small blog with a DA of 18 might have one brilliant guide that dozens of sites link to, giving that single page a PA of 35. DA tells you about the neighbourhood; PA tells you about the house.

Both scores move, too. Moz updates its link index and occasionally its model, so your DA can drop two points in a month when you’ve changed nothing at all. Chasing the weekly wobble is a fast route to madness.

How Bloggers Use These Scores

Used properly, DA and PA are comparison tools. If three competitors in your niche sit at DA 40, 45 and 52, that tells you something real about the link gap you’d need to close. It’s also the shorthand bloggers use when deciding where to pitch a guest post, or whether a site offering you a “collaboration” is worth your Saturday.

So the routine is familiar: someone offers you a guest post slot or a link placement, you paste their domain into a DA PA checker, and if the number looks healthy, you go ahead and write the piece.

That routine isn’t wrong, exactly. But it rests on an assumption — that the number the checker shows you is actually your DA. And this is where we have to be straight with you.

The Honest Bit: No Free Tool Can Show You Your Real DA

DA is Moz’s proprietary metric, calculated from Moz’s own index of links. Moz guards that data because it’s the product they sell. No other company has it. Which means no free third-party checker — including ours — can display your genuine Moz DA score, because the raw material simply isn’t available to us.

So what are all those instant-checker sites showing you? One of three things: a licensed trickle of Moz data (rare), an estimate built from their own separate crawl and dressed up in DA’s clothing, or — most often — a number invented to look authoritative. None of them is the score Moz would give you.

We decided our DA PA checker should tell you verifiable facts instead of printing a borrowed number with confidence it hasn’t earned.

Here’s what it actually does. It runs real RDAP lookups — the official registry data for the domain — and reports when the domain was registered (so you can see its genuine age), who the registrar is, and when the registration expires. It checks basic availability and DNS facts, the plumbing that tells you whether a domain is live and properly set up. And where you want the actual Moz metric, it links you out to Moz’s own tools, because that’s the only place the real number lives. Less flashy than an instant score out of 100? Perhaps. But every figure it gives you is true.

DA Is Not a Google Ranking Factor

Let’s remove the biggest myth entirely: Google does not use Domain Authority. Not a version of it, not a secret copy of it. Google’s own representatives have said this repeatedly over the years — DA is a third-party metric that Google has no access to and no need for, since it runs its own, far more detailed analysis.

A site with DA 60 can be outranked daily by a site with DA 25 that simply answers the search better. If DA decided rankings, that couldn’t happen. What DA does reasonably well is estimate, in broad strokes, how a site’s link profile compares with similar sites in the same niche. Used that way — as a rough comparison between genuine competitors — it’s a handy shortcut. Used as a ranking guarantee, it’s a horoscope.

The Scale Is Logarithmic, Not Linear

One more thing the bare number hides: the climb isn’t even. The scale behaves more like a Richter scale than a ruler — equal steps get harder as you go.

Moving from DA 20 to 30 is a realistic goal for a growing blog — publish strong content, earn a handful of decent links, and you’ll get there. Moving from 50 to 60 is a different sport altogether, demanding links from established, well-regarded sites. And 70 to 80? You’re now competing for links with national newspapers and household-name brands. Comparing your DA 24 blog to a DA 78 publisher and feeling discouraged is pointless — you’re playing a completely different game, and most niches never require you to reach it.

How DA Gets Inflated — and the Red Flags

Wherever a metric decides money, someone will game it, and DA decides a lot of money in the guest post and link-selling market. The usual tricks:

• Expired domains. Someone buys a dropped domain that kept its old links, slaps a thin blog on it, and sells placements on a “DA 55 site” that has existed for about a fortnight.
• Bought links and link networks. Clusters of sites built purely to link to each other inflate everyone’s scores while adding no real value.
• Spam at scale. Thousands of worthless directory, comment and forum links can nudge a score upward without a single genuine reader ever visiting.

The red flags are easy to spot once you look past the number. A DA 50 site that ranks for nothing, publishes on every topic from plumbing to cryptocurrency, has no visible readers, no comments, no social presence — that’s not authority, it’s a costume. Meanwhile a DA 19 blog in your exact niche, with real readers and content that ranks, is frequently the far better place for your guest post. Authority that matters shows up in the open; inflated authority hides behind a single metric.

Judge the Site, Not the Score

When you’re vetting a guest post opportunity or a potential link partner, these questions tell you more than any checker:

• Does it get real organic traffic? A site Google already sends visitors to has passed a test DA can’t fake.
• Does it rank for anything itself? Search for its topics. If its own content never appears, ask why yours would.
• Is it relevant to your niche? A link from a smaller site your readers actually visit beats a big number from an unrelated one.
• Does its link profile look natural? A spread of relevant sites linking in over time looks real; two hundred links from identical blogs does not.
• Is there an actual audience? Comments, shares, an email list, signs of life.

It also helps to check the basics the site presents to search engines — run its homepage through a meta checker and see whether its titles and descriptions look cared for, because a site that neglects its own foundations rarely looks after its contributors either.

Underneath all of this sits the thing scores try to summarise: genuine trust. The principles behind E-E-A-T for bloggers — real experience, a real author, content written to help rather than fill a quota — are what make other sites willing to link to you in the first place. No checker measures that, but it’s the engine the score is merely glancing at.

What Healthy DA Growth Looks Like for a New Blog

If your blog is new, your DA is probably 1, or close to it. Everyone starts there; established sites are not born at 40.

Realistically, a first year of consistent publishing, a few earned links and some digital PR might carry you into the teens or low twenties. That’s not failure — that’s the normal pace, and plenty of blogs earn a good living from search at those scores because they chose their topics well. While the external links build slowly, the authority lever entirely in your own hands is your internal linking strategy — pointing your own pages’ strength at the posts you most want to rank.

The growth itself only comes one way: publishing things worth linking to, then doing it again. Original data, genuinely useful tools, guides that answer a question better than anyone else — these earn links while you sleep. There is no shortcut worth having. Bought authority is rented, and the landlord is a spam network.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I check my real DA for free?

Only through Moz itself. Moz offers limited free lookups through its own tools, and fuller access through Moz Pro (including trials). Every other “free DA checker” is showing you an estimate or another company’s metric wearing DA’s name — sometimes a decent estimate, but never the genuine Moz score.

Is Domain Authority a Google ranking factor?

No. Google has confirmed more than once that it doesn’t use DA. It’s a Moz prediction about ranking likelihood, useful for comparisons, but it plays no part in Google’s algorithm.

What is a good DA for a blog?

There’s no universal number — it depends entirely on your niche. DA 25 might make you the strongest site in a small, specialist niche, while DA 45 could leave you mid-table in personal finance. Compare yourself with the sites you actually compete with, not with the internet at large.

Why did my DA drop when I changed nothing?

Because the score is relative. Moz updates its link index constantly, and if competing sites gained links faster than you, or Moz adjusted its model, your number can fall even though your own profile is unchanged. A small drop is background noise, not a diagnosis.

Can I increase my DA quickly?

You can increase the number quickly with bought links and network schemes — and risk a Google penalty and a worthless score in the process. Genuine authority grows slowly, through content that earns links. If an offer promises DA growth in a fortnight, it’s selling the costume, not the thing itself.

Final Thoughts

DA and PA aren’t useless — they’re just widely oversold. Treat them as a rough comparison tool between genuine competitors, and they’re a perfectly reasonable shortcut. Treat them as a verdict from Google, or a number to buy and sell by without looking at the site behind it, and they’ll lead you into paying for costumes.

So yes, run your domain through the DA PA checker now and then — check its facts, watch the trend over months rather than days, and follow the link to Moz for the official figure. Then go and do the unglamorous thing that actually moves every honest metric: publish something this week that deserves a link. That’s the whole secret, and it was never really a secret.