A common question on SEO forums like Reddit etc – how do you fake or astro-turf DA.
First Hypothesis – DA is based on Backlinks
You can easily do this by twiddling the input data into the tools. Here’s an example – I made SEMRush think that my Google Traffic went up 50% in one day or one week – I added 6 AI blog posts – usually it takes about 1-2 weeks to update some of the keyword ranking positions for keyword outside of SERP reports or however it works.
Firstly – DA is not solely based on Backlinks, so I set out to prove it, again using my own domain and here are the screenshots to prove it. They tweak the DA using estimated Organic Traffic. Because you expect that higher DA pages rank better.
So how did I setup this experiment? 1) I got lucky – I noticed that SERMush reported a “loss” of about 2000 backlinks – from whence they came I do not know, the loss I do not lament.. Outside of my control or care.
But I can make more content and I can publish inside my topical authority. So I did just that and posted 8 blog posts in one week. And SEMrush caught up in a single day and estimated y traffic went up from 6,200 to 9,200 clicks a month, MY topical authority is Google, SEO etc
Here you can see the backlink graph – both total backlinks and referring domains drop by almost 40% while my traffic went up 50% and my DA goes 26-30. DA is a sliding scale – which means 29 to DA is like going from 15 to 21 – 29 to 30 requires a lot more ….
Conclusion
SEMRush DA is very easy to fake or astro-turf. But so is SEO in general. If you really undersand backlinks, pagerank and topical authority then you can move needles, including in Google.
