E-E-A-T vs Domain Authority: What's the Difference?

Domain Authority (DA) is a third-party metric created by Moz to predict how well a site is likely to rank, built from Moz's own link-based data. Google has stated plainly that it does not use Domain Authority, or any single equivalent metric, as a ranking factor - it's an external prediction tool, not a signal Google's algorithms read.

E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trust - a framework Google uses to describe the qualities its ranking systems are designed to reward, drawn from its Search Quality Rater Guidelines. Google has also been explicit that there's no literal "E-E-A-T score" being calculated and applied to pages.

Despite neither being an official, named ranking factor in the way something like page speed is, they're not equivalent in relevance. Domain Authority has no connection to Google's actual ranking systems at all - a site can carry a high DA and still perform poorly in Google if the underlying signals Google does weigh, like content quality and genuine expertise, aren't there. E-E-A-T, while not a literal score, describes real qualities that Google's ranking systems are built to detect and reward through a variety of underlying signals - author expertise, first-hand experience, citations from authoritative sources, trust signals like transparency and accuracy - and that weight increases further for YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) topics where poor information could cause real harm. In practice, that makes E-E-A-T the more useful concept to actually build content strategy around, while Domain Authority is better treated as one external, third-party benchmarking tool rather than something to optimize for directly.