Domain authority

Moz publishes Domain Authority, Ahrefs publishes Domain Rating, Semrush publishes Authority Score. Each is a proprietary model trained on that vendor’s own crawl of the link graph, each is logarithmic — so the step from 50 to 60 is far larger than 20 to 30 — and none is calibrated against the others. Two tools disagreeing about a domain by twenty points is normal and means only that they crawled different subsets of the web.

Google has stated repeatedly that it has no domain-wide authority score of this kind. That does not make the vendor metrics useless: as a rough comparison between two domains, inside one tool, on one day, they carry information. It makes them a description rather than a cause.

The distinction matters commercially because the metric is purchasable and the ranking is not. Links can be bought that move a vendor’s score within weeks and move nothing in a search result, which is precisely why the score is the number quoted in a proposal.

Buying a number no search engine reads

A campaign priced against raising DR from 20 to 35 has a deliverable the supplier fully controls and a business outcome it does not. Ask instead which queries the work is meant to move, what they are worth, and how the answer will be measured — and treat any proposal whose primary success metric is a third-party score as a proposal to move a third-party score.

Where this sits, and what it takes down with it.

The ratios a decision is taken on. They inherit every error below them, which is why they are the last thing to trust and the first thing quoted.

There is no formula to give. There is none to publish. Each score is a proprietary model over the vendor’s own crawl of the link graph, and the vendors do not disclose the weighting. A figure quoted from one tool cannot be reproduced from another’s data or from anything a search engine exposes.

SEO

Making a site findable by search engines for the questions its buyers actually ask — a structural property of the site far more than a list of tasks performed on it.

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Black-hat SEO

Tactics that manufacture ranking signals rather than earn them — cheap to buy, effective for a while, and the penalty outlives the supplier.

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Vanity metrics

Numbers that rise without anything else improving — followers, impressions, likes — and which, when bought, actively damage the account that carries them.

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Average position

The mean rank of your appearances weighted by how often each occurred — a single number averaging page one with page nine, and among the most misread statistics in search.

All sixty-seven termsWhat this is regulated by in the UAE

Is this one right in your own numbers?

The definitions are the easy part. Whether the figure on your dashboard was computed this way is a different question, and usually the more expensive one.