What is domain authority (PageRank)?

Domain authority is how much the rest of the web vouches for a domain by linking to it. It's the idea behind Google's original PageRank: a link is a vote, votes from authoritative places count more, and you can't easily vote for yourself. In webrank this is the pagerank number — 0 to 10, log-scale, 10 = the most linked-to domains on the web.

How we compute it

The authority score is a weighted composite of the link-measuring sources — the Common Crawl web graph (~140M domains, billions of inter-domain links), Majestic (referring subnets), and Open PageRank — with weights derived by anchoring on the link sources, the mirror image of how the popularity weights anchor on traffic sources. Both weight vectors and the validation are on the methodology page.

Why it's a separate number

Traffic and links disagree in systematic ways, and the disagreement is the signal:

Infrastructure looks popular but not authoritative. CDN and tracker domains get

enormous DNS traffic and few links. A high webrank with a low pagerank says "machines touch this, people don't cite it".

Institutions look authoritative beyond their traffic. Standards bodies, licenses,

archives (gmpg.org, w3.org-style domains) are linked from millions of pages people rarely visit. Low-ish webrank, top pagerank.

Link spam can't fake traffic; bot traffic can't fake links. Gaming one number leaves a

visible gap to the other — the pair is more manipulation-resistant than either alone.

pagerank vs Moz DA / Ahrefs DR / Majestic Flow

Commercial SEO scores (0–100) measure the same construct from proprietary crawlers behind a paywall. webrank's pagerank is free, open-method, and API-first — see the full comparison at pagerank vs Domain Authority.

curl https://api.webrank.top/rank/gmpg.org