What is Authority Score?

Backlink Analytics on Semrush uses Authority Score to measure the impact of a webpage or domain’s links. Authority Score is our compound metric that grades the overall quality of a website or a webpage. 

The higher the score, the more assumed weight a domain’s or webpage’s outbound links to another site could have.

The calculation is based on three main facets: 

1. Link Power: quality and quantity of backlinks
2. Organic Traffic: estimated monthly average of traffic 
3. Spam Factors (Natural Profile): indicators of manipulation or spam in the link profile

We pull our organic traffic and backlink data for Link Power and Organic Traffic straight from our databases. 

Natural Profile shows the result of a series of checks for suspicious SEO behavior. In other words, the result of manipulation.

Link Power, Organic Traffic, and Natural Profile break down into eight factors. They’re all weighted in the following order: 

1. Link power 
2. Organic traffic 
3. No organic rankings on SERPs 
4. Unnaturally high % of dofollow domains 
5. An imbalance between links and organic traffic 
6. Too many referring domains with the same IP address 
7. Too many referring domains with the same IP network 
8. Presence of another domain with an identical backlink profile 

The first factor describes the data powering the Link Power category. The second factor weighs in how much organic traffic a site approximately gets every month. It’s the data that powers the Organic Traffic category. 

The rest of the factors (3-8 in the list above) are what go into the Natural Profile category. They’re spam indicators. 

• Link power is calculated by the amount of follow referring domains, along with the authority of those referring domains, that point to a website.
• Organic traffic comes from our Domain Analytics and is estimated based on a website’s total keyword positions and the click potential of every position.
• No organic rankings on SERPs mean that the site has 0 keyword rankings within Google’s top 100 organic positions.
• An unnaturally high % of dofollow domains means that more than 90% of the website’s referring domains only send links without the “nofollow” attribute. This is an unusually high ratio, which is almost always the result of unethical and unnatural link-building to manipulate search engines.
• An imbalance between links and organic traffic can indicate a site with a poor user experience that built an unnaturally large backlink profile, likely as an attempt to manipulate search engines.
• Too many referring domains with the same IP address or network is also a sign of a manipulated link profile. Private Blog Networks (PBNs) are networks of fake blogs created for the sole purpose of providing backlinks for SEO value. They can often be identified when it's clear that a group of related sites link to each other and are hosted on the IP address or subnet.
• The presence of another domain with an identical backlink profile means that we found at least one other domain with an identical backlink profile. This is a sign of unethical and unnatural link manipulation. 

The last factor (presence of another domain with an identical backlink profile) is based on data from this widget in the Overview report in Backlink Analytics (competition level at least 95%):

If we see that there is a domain that has anything over a 95% competition level, there’s a chance this site might have bought backlinks or is part of a private blog network.  

We update the Authority Scores for all domains once every two weeks to keep them fresh. 

You can find more details on how to use Authority Score on our blog.

What do the Authority Score labels mean?

How do you know if a score is good or not?

Generally speaking, the higher the Authority Score of a domain, the more trusted it is. It is based on a scale of 1 to 100 so the closer the Authority Score is to 100 the better.

As a website’s score increases, the impact of its outgoing links will increase. However, the impact of a link also strongly depends on your website’s niche. Authority Score is best used for domain comparison, and not for determining good/bad on an absolute scale.

For example, use these scores in the Backlinks Report or Bulk Backlink Analysis to compare the trust levels of multiple websites. By comparing these scores you can evaluate which domain’s link profile is strongest and will send the most link weight when linking to other sites.

Where can I find Authority Score? 

You can find this score in: 

• Project Dashboard 
• Projects 
• Keyword Overview 
• Domain Overview
• Backlink Analytics
• Backlink Gap
• Backlink Audit
• Bulk Backlinks Analysis 
• Link Building Tool

Frequently Asked Questions

For further guidance, check out our blog and find answers to the following questions: