A reoccurring question that comes up when people are questioning Google on the metrics used for ranking is ‘Do you use domain authority?’
The answer from John Mueller of Google himself:
“No, that’s a proprietary Moz metric. We don’t use Domain Authority.”
John further expanded on the answer in an interview featured on brainlabsdigital.com:
“I don’t know if I’d call it ‘authority’ like that, but we do have some metrics that are more on a site level, some metrics that are more on a page level, and some of those site wide level metrics might kind of map into similar things.”
This can be further emphasized by Gary Illes, Google’s head webmaster trends analyst, in his comments back in 2019: “whatever Fishkin’s new theory is, those are generally made up crap.”
Rand Fishkin is the founder of Moz and the creator of the “domain authority” theory-based metric, a metric Google does not officially use or even recognize as a valid metric in their search engine.
For years various 3rd party metrics have been referenced when making Google SEO assessments. Majestic’s “trust flow” and “citation flow” is another example. These metrics are based on 3rd party proprietary theory.
Theories have there place. Any veteran SEO has more than 1 or two ideas about how Google’s search engine work that is not revealed to the public by Google. Theories can lead to discovery but it’s dangerous when people start confusing them with proven facts.