Domain authority
Domain authority estimates the overall credibility of a site in search engines' eyes, primarily based on the quality and diversity of its inbound links. SEO tools score it from 0 to 100 as a comparative benchmark across sites.
In practice
This is a tool metric — Moz, Ahrefs, Semrush — not an official Google criterion. Useful for gauging competitive position; misleading as an end in itself. A recently built domain with strong fundamentals regularly outranks an older neglected one on targeted queries. The twelve-month trend matters more than the absolute figure.