The simple answer PageRank!

[cs.princeton.edu...]

Domain Authority nothing but rank of domain popularity...

Domain Authority nothing but rank of domain popularity...

Actually wasn't that MozRank?

According to the creator of Domain Authority it is a score (on a 100-point scale) developed by Moz that predicts how well a website will rank on search engines. Use Domain Authority when comparing one site to another or tracking the “strength” of your website over time.

[moz.com...]

MOZ claims Domain Authority is made up of an aggregate of metrics (MozRank, MozTrust, link profile, and more) which has no actual formula that MOZ will openly discuss. However;

[moz.com...]
[moz.com...]

Technical Definition of MozRank (mR)

MozRank refers to Moz’s general, logarithmically scaled 10-point measure of global link authority (popularity). MozRank is very similar in purpose to the measures of static importance (which means importance independent of a specific query) that are used by the search engines (e.g., Google's PageRank). Search engines often rank pages with higher global link authority ahead of pages with lower authority. Because measures like MozRank are global and static, this ranking power applies to a broad range of search queries, rather than pages optimized specifically for a particular keyword.

First it is a 100 point scale then a 10 point scale that includes MozRank which includes link popularly but doesn't because the link profile is considered separately or just some BS to make users think their tools are special.

Domain authority counts for NOTHING in today's market, google segregates results based on GEOIP and I can rank any small to medium enterprise business purely by designing one geo-targeted page per suburb or town or area in their state of targeting. At NUMBER 1 in google with a very simple google adwords quality score 10/10 reverse engineer process.

The pagerank and domain authority mean absolutely nothing to google apart from GLOBAL KEYWORDS, in which case, it's more regarding the traffic or data pushed across all your domains.

Remembering each PAGE on your website has a differing authority versus keywords you target and a different pagerank as well.

ONE PAGE, ONE 10/10 QUALITY SCORE, SPEND SOME CASH ON PAID TRAFFIC, LET THE SEARCH ENGINES KNOW IT EXISTS and it will rank.

Problem is, to take on some of the larger niches, you literally need millions of dollars to get ranked in Google.

Cheers.

There is more than one way to get ranks.