---
title: "Domain authority scores for link prospecting"
url: "https://lookvalid.com/blog/industry/domain-authority-for-link-prospecting.md"
canonical_url: "https://lookvalid.com/blog/industry/domain-authority-for-link-prospecting"
last_updated: "2026-10-22"
type: "conceptual"
summary: "What a domain authority style score measures, what it misses, and how our domain authority lookup builds its 0 to 100 number from open data."
related: ["https://lookvalid.com/products/domain-authority.md", "https://lookvalid.com/tools/domain-authority-checker.md", "https://lookvalid.com/docs/api/domain-authority.md"]
---

# Domain authority scores for link prospecting

What a domain authority style score measures, what it misses, and how our domain authority lookup builds its 0 to 100 number from open data.

A domain authority style score squeezes a domain's prominence in link data into one number, which makes it handy for sorting a long prospect list. It is a shortcut, not a measurement of traffic, trust or revenue. Here is what such a score can and cannot tell you, and exactly how the LookValid domain authority lookup computes its own.

## What a score like this is, and is not

Any authority style score starts from link or popularity data about the whole web, ranks every domain, and rescales the rank to a friendly range such as 0 to 100. The number says how prominent a domain is in that data. It does not say whether the site converts visitors, whether its editors answer email, or whether a link from it would be editorially valuable.

Because every tool picks its own data and its own formula, a score from one tool is not comparable with a score from another. Pick one source, keep using it, and compare domains only against each other inside that source.

Treat the number as a sorting key. It is good at separating a household-name site from an unknown one, and weak at separating two mid-sized sites. Read the pages before you pitch.

## What our lookup computes

The LookValid score is our own calculation from two open datasets, and it is not a ranking published by anyone else. The first is the Common Crawl web graph. Common Crawl publishes host-level and domain-level graphs, and the domain graph is built by aggregating the host graph at the pay-level domain, using the Public Suffix List [1]. Its tooling computes PageRank or harmonic centrality over such graphs [2]. We read each domain's position in the domain graph for both measures.

The second is the Majestic Million, a list of the one million domains with the most referring subnets, released under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license [3]. We read the domain's rank in that list.

Each position becomes a signal from 0 to 100 on a log scale of its list: signal = 100 x (1 minus log10(position) divided by log10(list size)). Position 1 scores 100 and the last position of the full list scores 0. A list that does not hold the domain contributes 0. The final score is the rounded weighted sum.

How the three signals combine into one score

| Signal | Source | Weight |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Harmonic centrality position | Common Crawl domain graph | 0.4 |
| PageRank position | Common Crawl domain graph | 0.2 |
| Global rank | Majestic Million | 0.4 |

We keep the best 5 million domains of the Common Crawl ranks. A domain below that cut, and below the Majestic list, comes back as `found: false` with a reason, which is free. That means the domain ranks below both lists, not that it has no authority. A subdomain with no rank of its own is matched to its parent domain, and the response says so in `matched_domain`.

## A worked example

The table below comes from a captured example response for wikipedia.org. You can check the arithmetic yourself: 0.4 x 85.9 + 0.2 x 81 + 0.4 x 82 = 83.36, which rounds to 83.

Captured example for wikipedia.org (domain authority product)

| Field | Value | Meaning |
| --- | --- | --- |
| signals.common_crawl.harmonic_position | 14 | Rank by harmonic centrality |
| signals.common_crawl.pagerank_position | 35 | Rank by PageRank |
| signals.common_crawl.domains_in_release | 133241980 | Domains in the graph release |
| signals.majestic.rank | 12 | Position in the Majestic Million |
| signals.majestic.signal | 82 | 100 x (1 minus log10(12) divided by log10(1000000)) |
| authority_score | 83 | The weighted sum, rounded |

The response also returns the formula, the weights and the Common Crawl release name, so every score can be recomputed from the raw positions.

## Using it for link prospecting

- Score the whole prospect list once, then sort. Start with the top third and read those sites first.
- Set a floor, not a target. Dropping domains below a threshold removes noise without pretending that 61 is meaningfully better than 59.
- Keep the reasoning. The `signals` object shows which list put the domain where it is, which helps when a site is strong in one list and absent from the other.
- Check relevance by hand. A high score on an unrelated topic is rarely a good link to chase.

## Score a list of domains

One lookup costs 10 credits when it finds the domain, and a repeat of the same lookup inside the cache window is free. This call scores a single domain; wrap it in a loop for a list.

Request one domain authority score

```bash
curl -X POST https://YOUR_API_HOST/v1/domain-authority \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $LOOKVALID_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"domain":"wikipedia.org"}'
```

Try it without an account in the [domain authority checker](https://lookvalid.com/tools/domain-authority-checker.md), or read the [domain authority product page](https://lookvalid.com/products/domain-authority.md) for the full response.

## Sources

1. [Common Crawl: web graphs (host and domain level)](https://commoncrawl.org/web-graphs), read 2026-10-19
2. [Common Crawl cc-webgraph repository README](https://github.com/commoncrawl/cc-webgraph), read 2026-10-19
3. [Majestic Million report](https://majestic.com/reports/majestic-million), read 2026-10-19

By LookValid data team. Published 2026-10-19, updated 2026-10-19.

## Related

- [Domain Authority API](https://lookvalid.com/products/domain-authority.md)
- [Free domain authority checker](https://lookvalid.com/tools/domain-authority-checker.md)
- [Domain Authority reference](https://lookvalid.com/docs/api/domain-authority.md)