Domain Authority

Domain authority is a score, developed by third-party SEO companies rather than Google itself, that estimates how strong and trustworthy a website is likely to appear to search engines. It is usually expressed on a scale from one to one hundred and is influenced heavily by the quantity and quality of backlinks a site has earned.

It is important to understand that domain authority is a predictive estimate, not a metric Google uses directly. It is useful for comparison, gauging your site against competitors or tracking your own progress over time, but a high score does not guarantee rankings and a modest one does not doom them.

For a local owner, domain authority is best treated as a rough health indicator. Steadily earning quality backlinks and publishing genuinely useful content will raise it over time, which tends to correlate with stronger organic performance, but it should never distract from the local signals that drive the Map Pack.