Research. I spent $275 to manipulate domain “authority”. Ahrefs DR, Moz DA, Semrush AS, and Majestic TF tested for reliability. Only one of them is tamper-proof.

There’s a whole industry of thousands of freelancers who boost the domain “authority” metrics for any given domain.

I dived into this “rabbit hole” to see how deep it goes.

In this post:

• Anyone can effortlessly inflate Ahrefs DR, Moz DA, and Majestic TF scores for less than $50.
• For now, the only tamper-proof website authority indicator seems to be Semrush AS.
• I found it in due diligence for a potential $500k online business acquisition.

Here is the 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 will 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 the website “authority” metrics.

The significant examples – Empire Flippers uses Semrush AS, and GoDaddy relies on Majestic TF. There are hundreds of similar integrations on the market.

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

So now the market is more risky for the buyer. 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.

Now, let me share how I discovered this 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.

Because “fake” backlinks can be a time bomb that may explode and cut the organic traffic from Google overnight.

Hundreds of genuine backlinks from the relevant domains are an excellent asset that will grow over time.

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

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

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.

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. 

For example, as of November 15th, 2023, Ahrefs and Semrush see 3000+ backlinks referring to SEOManipulateTest.com, while Majestic and Moz discovered less than 200 links each.

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.

Key Takeaways

1. There’s a whole industry of thousands of freelancers who promise the inflated Ahrefs DR, MOZ DA, and Majestic TF metric for any domain. They have tens of thousands of verified 5* reviews for this job.
2. Anybody can pay between $15 and $100 and get the result in a few weeks. You don’t need to access the website.
3. The results of our experiment show that “authority hackers” deliver on their promises.
4. We haven’t found any way to inflate the Semrush AS.

So, here’s my rating of the domain metrics reliability:

1. Semrush AS – the best. 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. 
4. Ahrefs DR – this domain authority metric is the cheapest, easiest, and fastest to tamper.

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

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