We Paid $275 to Black Hat SEOs to Manipulate Domain “Authority” Metrics. Tested Ahrefs DR, Moz DA, Semrush AS, and Majestic TF Reliability.

Originally written Feb 5th, 2024, updated Feb 16th, 2025 to include recent research.

We studied more than 12k domains in seven experiments throughout 2024. In all cases, we found legacy metrics from Ahrefs and Moz to be more harmful and risky than helpful.

It’s not a big secret. There’s plenty of evidence provided by experienced SEOs such as Dmytro Sokhach, discussed on Reddit, published on SearchEngineLand, etc.

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Here Are Our Key Findings About Domain “Authority” Metrics

1. Anyone can buy DR and DA of 50+ for any domain for as low as $50. We tried and succeeded. This black market still exists and even grow in 2025.

2. When Google penalizes a website entirely for spam, its DR and DA don’t change or can even grow! We found hundreds of cases after the March 24 Google update.

Here’s an example:

You can see the site traffic here, plummeting to zero after the Google update.

3. Neither DR nor DA can predict whether the content will actually rank.

We published similar content on one website with high DR and DA and one with low ”authority.” The second one won on all merits.

4. DR and DA tend to be overly optimistic in measurements, giving higher scores in all research cohorts.

We took 150 websites from small businesses, link-builders, and S&P 500 companies. In 81% of cases, DR or DA provided the highest scores out of all tested metrics, including some websites penalized by Google with zero traffic.

5. DR and DA are never used on reputable online business marketplaces like Flippa and Empire Flippers. These reputed marketplaces have strong regulations, require full disclosure, and the buyers are mostly qualified.

Instead, they rely on Semrush AS—the most “pessimistic” and conservative metric, which considers both a website’s Google traffic and backlink profile.

If a site is penalized by Google or loses traffic, AS drops to nearly zero, making this metric almost impossible to manipulate.

6. On the other end of the spectrum, all known link-building services promote their links using DR, DA, or both—never Semrush AS.

Coincidentally, the buyers of these services are mostly small business owners who lack deep SEO knowledge and are unaware of the flaws in these metrics.

7. Guest-posting marketplaces, primarily used by SEO professionals, fall somewhere in the middle.

While most still rely on DR and DA, top players provide AS, organic traffic, and traffic per country, helping buyers make more informed decisions.

That’s the key findings. Here’s the detailed story and the research we did.

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Here’s the Long Story

Website-related online business transactions are massive:

• Website acquisitions marketplace Flippa.com alone added 170,000 new buyers and $36 Billion in liquidity in 2022.
• The US domain names market ended 2022 at $9 Billion.
• The link-building market is shady, but 10,000+ freelancers offer such services on UpWork and Fiverr. Most SEO companies offer link-building services as well. 

Sellers often use the website “authority” scores as a selling point and value indicator.

Digital PR, website acquisitions, domain name auctions, and SEO services businesses widely adopt these website “authority” metrics.

The initial intent of such integrations was fair—to help sellers better advertise the value of their lots and buyers evaluate potential purchases in more detail.

But what gets measured, gets manipulated.

Over time, people found cheap ways to effectively inflate the most domain authority metrics without improving their actual value.

So, the market is now more risky for buyers. Unfair sellers can artificially increase their business value to sell at a higher price tag.

1. It’s super easy to find how to do so. Thousands of authority “hackers” are ready to help.
2. Business marketplaces are not motivated to resolve the issue. Because better business metrics are helping to sell.
3. The consumer ends up paying for the whole banquet. That’s not good.

Entrepreneurs and marketers invest their time and money into online businesses.

Their investments can be at risk.

This knowledge will benefit the market. And probably motivate the software vendors to improve their algorithms. That’s why I wrote this article.

There’s a whole industry of freelancers who boost the domain “authority” metrics for any given domain. Now, let me share how I discovered this DR tampering.

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How I Discovered This “Rabbit Hole” of DR Tampering

In October 2023, I was searching for an online business to acquire. Yet another listing was a $500,000 online education business for sale.

The lion’s share of their traffic was Google organic. Which is good because no marketing spending is necessary to run this business.

The backlinks profile for their website looked solid. Roughly 200 links from tens of sites, many of which had a high Domain Rating from Ahrefs:

What triggered the alarm was that most referring domains had zero organic traffic. Meaning they weren’t ranking in Google for a single word!

“High authority” websites that Google doesn’t rank.

That’s suspicious.

It’s like somebody wearing a Rolex and asking for coins on the street. It would be fair to assume the Rolex is not genuine.

Just a reminder. I was planning to invest half a million dollars in the website. From a money perspective, it’s like buying 50 average Rolex watches.

I didn’t want to buy the fake one.

So, I asked my SEO partner Alex to check the referring domains further.

And I declined this acquisition opportunity after he delivered his analysis.

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We Manually Checked the Referring Domains

What Alex did:

1. He imported all referring domains to the spreadsheet.
2. Manually “score” every domain 0-100 for
   1. Rankings in Google
   2. Content relevance to the business
   3. Backlinks profile quality
   4. Usability. Ensure each site is built for people, not to defraud Google.
3. Run the domain list through the most used SEO tools – Semrush, Ahrefs, MOZ, and Majestic. To get their “opinion” on the domain authority.

The results for the top 10 referring domains were intriguing:

• The manual check was distressing – mostly low-quality links, non-relevant sites, useless content, and zero usability. The average manual “authority” score was 9/100.
• Semrush-rated domains are even lower, with an average score of 6/100.
• The average “authority” from Ahrefs and MOZ was 61/100, which is considered excellent authority from the industry perspective.
• The Majestic TF score was 14/100.

Below the top 10 referring domains, the average score for the remaining 33 domains was near zero for all tools and manual checks.

At this point, I decided to turn out the deal.

My potential investment’s whole “authority” was a house built on sand.

If Google changes the algorithm, this business can suddenly lose almost 100% of its traffic, sales, and value.

My engineering mind, however, wanted to dive deeper.

After 15+ years in e-commerce and SAAS marketing, I was intrigued to understand the massive difference between reality and metrics designed to measure this reality.

I also wanted to understand the difference between the top 10 rubbish domains rated so high by Ahrefs and MOZ. And ones from the bottom part of the list that were also rubbish but rated low by all tools.

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An Industry of “Authority” Hackers

Alex went to Fiverr and immediately found that boosting domain metrics is an industry.

Sellers often bundle Ahrefs DR, MOZ DA, and Majestic TF into the same deals.

On the other hand, nobody was promising to boost Semrush AS. We tried to negotiate the task, but the freelancers weren’t ready to offer any quick and easy solution, even for a minor score boost from 0 to 20 points.

To make the experiment fair, Alex published a job description on UpWork and evaluated 30 candidates, trying to find someone to inflate the Semrush AS quickly.

No success. Nobody was ready to guarantee the fast boost of the Semrush Authority Score without doing the actual SEO work – research, content planning, writing, link building, tech SEO, etc.

We could find some freelancers ready to try, but they couldn’t share proof of past success and asked for several months and hundreds of dollars in costs. 

I wasn’t that curious to pay $400 to a non-verified freelancer and wait a few months for results. It was too much effort to call it “easy authority inflation.”

“Authority hackers” promised the fastest results for the Ahrefs DR metric, with the Moz DA and Majestic TF scores growing a few weeks later.

We decided to move forward with five freelancers and five domains. With some naming help from ChatGPT, Alex registered:

• SEOManipulationLab.com
• DRvsASExperiment.com
• SEOManipulateTest.com
• AuthorityCheckLab.com
• RankingTestLab.com

Based on the reviews, we selected five Fiverr contractors to try the cheapest options and more reputable ones with slightly higher prices.

The experiment started on October 22nd, 2023.

As of December 26, 2023, freelancers delivered the promised result for all domains:

The freelancers build up to thousands of links from other sites to “hack” the website’s “authority.” We paid from $15 for SEOManipulationLab.com to $85 for DRvsASExperiment.com. The latter included tampering with Ahrefs DR, Majestic TF, and Moz DA.

Interestingly, different SEO tools vary a lot in their backlinks discovery pace. Semrush and Ahrefs discover backlinks momentarily. Moz and Majestic are much slower. 

To summarize:

• Ahrefs discovered backlinks built by our contractors and scored our five domains with DR in the range of 44-59.
• Semrush also discovered backlinks but scored our domains at zero.
• Moz and Majestic found less than 10% of the backlinks built. However, their authority scores were successfully influenced.

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Key Takeaways

1. Anyone can inflate a site’s DR and DA to 50+ for as little as $15 to $100. We did it ourselves for our experiment. Many link-sellers and site flippers do it to fetch higher valuation. And the market continues to thrive even in 2025.

2. The DR and DA metrics don’t change even after Google penalizes the website for spam. In fact, these domain “authority” metrics even grow sometimes despite the site’s falling-to-zero traffic.

3. We haven’t found any way to inflate the Semrush AS.

4. DR and DA tend to be overly optimistic in measurements, even for spam sites. AS tends to be conservative.

5. Reputable marketplaces like Flippa and Empire Flippers use Semrush AS. Link-building services selling links use DR and DA. Guest posting marketplaces fall somewhere in between these two, using a mix of both.

Based on these key findings from our research, here’s my rating of the domain metrics reliability:

1. Semrush AS – My favorite. We found no way to tamper it artificially.
2. Majestic TF –  Good. You can inflate it somewhat, though.
3. Moz DA – Ironically, it looks better than Ahrefs DR because it works so slowly. In the long term, I expect that they’ll show similar authority. You can check Moz DA for any domain here.
4. Ahrefs DR – This domain authority metric is the cheapest, easiest, and fastest to tamper.

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I highly recommend getting a “second opinion” if you have previously relied on Ahrefs, Moz, or Majestic. Try free Semrush Authority Score checking tool to evaluate any website Authority Score:

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