How exactly does domain authority work?

[athryne]

It has to do with trust, and then after that, it's just backlinks from other high quality ranking sites?

 

[Homeni]

Yes, domain authority relies on backlinks. The higher the number of high quality links you have, the more the authority of your domain.

 

[Vinnsa]

Domain Authority is a made up metric by MOZ. It basically weights your domain based on the backlinks you have. Each backlink you gain has a different weight based on how many backlinks the site that is linking to you has.

Google has something almost equivalent, but it's not a 1:1 score. We know because it was in the search documentation leaks.