The domain authority (also referred to as thought leadership) of a website describes its relevance for a specific subject area or industry.
[1] This relevance has a direct impact on its ranking by search engines, trying to assess domain authority through automated analytic algorithms.
[4] Domain authority can be described through four dimensions: The weight of these factors varies in function of the ranking body.
When individuals judge domain authority, decisive factors can include the prestige of a website, the prestige of the contributing authors in a specific domain, the quality and relevance of the information on a website, the novelty of the content, but also the competitive situation around the discussed subject area or the quality of the outgoing links.
[5] Several search engines (e.g., Bing, Google, Yahoo) have developed automated analyses and rank algorithms for domain authority.
[6] The software as a service company Moz.org has developed an algorithm and weighted level metric, branded as "Domain Authority", which gives predictions on a website's performance in search engine rankings with a discriminating range from 0 to 100.
To do so, Google’s PageRank looks at factors like link-diversification and link-dynamics: When too many links are coming from the same domain or webmaster, there is a risk of black-hat SEO.
They also consider the frequency of new content publication ('freshness of information') to ensure that the website remains an active participant in the community.