Domain authority increases when you earn more high-quality backlinks than your competitors while maintaining a clean link profile. Focus on backlinks from sites with DR 40+ in your industry, since ten links from DR 60 sites matter more than a hundred from DR 10 blogs. Guest posts on established industry publications, digital PR that lands media mentions, and creating original research or tools that naturally attract links are the most reliable methods. Publish content worth linking to at least twice monthly. Data studies, comprehensive guides, and free tools generate backlinks passively for years. We've seen client DA climb from 22 to 38 over eight months primarily through one viral industry report that earned 340 referring domains. Technical health affects DA indirectly. Google won't pass full link equity through a slow site with crawl errors and broken internal links. Run monthly audits to fix 404s, improve Core Web Vitals, and ensure your strongest pages aren't accidentally noindexed. Sites loading under 2.5 seconds typically see better DA growth from the same link acquisition efforts. Disavow genuinely spammy backlinks if you inherited bad SEO or got hit with negative SEO, but don't obsess over every low-quality link. A few dozen spam links won't tank your DA if you have 500+ legitimate ones. We only disavow when a client has obvious PBN footprints or purchased link schemes. Internal linking structure matters more than people realize. Your homepage and key category pages should receive the most internal links to concentrate authority where it counts. Orphan pages dilute your link equity distribution. Expect 3-6 months before seeing measurable DA movement and 12-18 months to make substantial jumps. A site jumping from DA 25 to DA 50 isn't realistic in under a year unless you're in an extremely low-competition niche. At Ottawa SEO, we track referring domain growth and average DR of new links monthly rather than obsessing over the DA number itself, since those inputs predict DA changes before Moz's algorithm catches up.