A perennial conundrum echoes across the digital amphitheaters of SEO discourse—from the sprawling threads of Reddit to the focused exchanges of professional forums: How, precisely, does one fabricate or astro-turf the metric known as Domain Authority (DA)?
The Primitive Assumption: Backlinks as the Sole Determinant
The initial, and perhaps most instinctive, hypothesis posits that DA is fundamentally a function of Backlinks. If this were universally true, the manipulation of this score would be a relatively straightforward exercise of data obfuscation—a simple “twiddling” of the inputs fed into the analytical tools.
Consider a practical thought experiment: I engineered a scenario wherein I induced SEMRush to believe my organic Google traffic had surged by 50% within a single, arbitrary reporting period (a day or a week). This was achieved not through direct backlink manipulation, but by the injection of six AI-generated blog posts—a rapid content deployment that typically requires 1-2 weeks for keyword ranking positions outside of standard SERP reports to normalize.
The Refutation: DA Transcends Simple Link Equity
My subsequent empirical investigation, conducted on my own established domain, was designed to disprove the primacy of backlinks in the DA equation. The results, evidenced by the forthcoming screenshots (omitted here for brevity), suggest a more nuanced reality: DA is not solely predicated on backlink volume or quality.
These proprietary metrics are, in fact, demonstrably tweakable via estimated Organic Traffic. The rationale is inherently recursive: a tool expects pages with higher calculated DA to exhibit superior ranking performance; therefore, estimated performance acts as an input to the score itself.
The Empirical Setup: A Serendipitous Detachment
The experiment’s genesis lay in a moment of serendipitous external factor: I noticed that SEMRush inexplicably registered a sudden “loss” of approximately 2,000 backlinks. The origin and subsequent departure of these links remain an external variable, a loss over which I held neither control nor care.
However, I retained control over my internal content production. Operating strictly within my established topical authority (Google, SEO, etc.), I deployed eight blog posts in a single week. The result was a dramatic shift:
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SEMRush recalibrated its estimate of my monthly traffic, surging from 6,200 to 9,200 clicks in just one day.
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Crucially, the backlink graph concurrently showed that both total backlinks and referring domains dropped by almost 40%.
Simultaneously, while backlink metrics plummeted, my estimated traffic rose by 50%, and my Domain Authority increased from 26 to 30.
The Non-Linearity of Authority Scaling
This jump from DA 26 to 30 highlights a critical point: DA is a sliding, non-linear scale. The ascent from DA 29 to DA 30 requires a quantum leap in imputed authority that is disproportionately greater than the progress from, say, DA 15 to DA 21.
This tries to follow the foundational principles of PageRank , where the value of authority is diluted by the total number of links on a page. The lower a link appears on a page, the less “authority flow” it transmits. Similarly, increasing one’s DA at the higher end of the scale demands a massive, exponential input—an input that, in this case, appears to be heavily weighted toward demonstrated organic traffic and topical relevance, rather than simple link counting.
The completion of a 1,500-word treatise would further unpack how this content dilution and traffic estimation intersect to redefine the modern notion of “authority.”
Conclusion
SEMRush DA is very easy to fake or astro-turf. But so is SEO in general. If you really understand backlinks, PageRank and topical authority then you can move needles, including in Google.
