If you've spent any time researching guest posting, you've probably noticed something confusing: two sites can have wildly different Domain Authority scores but similar traffic, or the reverse — a site with a modest DA pulling in millions of visitors a month. So which number should actually guide your decision? The honest answer is: neither one alone tells the full story, and treating them as interchangeable is where a lot of people go wrong.
Domain Authority (DA) is a third-party metric, originally developed by Moz, that predicts how likely a website is to rank in search engines based largely on its backlink profile. It's not something Google itself uses — it's an external estimate built to approximate authority. A high DA generally means a lot of other sites link to that domain, and those linking sites are themselves considered credible.
That's useful information. But it says nothing about who's actually visiting the site, how engaged those visitors are, or whether a real human being will ever see the article you publish there.
Traffic numbers measure something completely different: how many people are actually showing up. A site can have enormous backlink equity and a sky-high DA while getting a fraction of the visitors of a smaller, newer site that's simply better at drawing an audience through social media, email, or word of mouth.
For a guest post specifically, traffic matters because it affects whether your article — and the link inside it — ever gets seen by a real person who might click through to your site. A backlink sitting on a high-DA page that nobody visits still helps your SEO on a technical level, but it won't send you any direct visitors.
Here's the practical issue: a lot of guest posting services advertise DA numbers front and center because it's an easy, impressive-looking figure to sell. But DA alone doesn't guarantee your content will be seen, shared, or acted on. If your goal is purely long-term SEO authority, a high-DA placement is valuable even with modest traffic. If your goal includes actual referral visitors — people clicking through and exploring your site — traffic starts to matter just as much, if not more.
The ideal guest post sits at the intersection of both: a site with a credible DA and a real, active audience. Those placements are harder to get precisely because everyone wants them, but they're worth prioritizing over sites that only look good on paper.
Before submitting a guest post anywhere, it helps to look past the DA number and ask a few more grounded questions:
A site that checks these boxes, even with a moderate DA, is often a better bet than a high-DA site that's essentially a ghost town.
If you're building a guest posting strategy, don't chase DA numbers in isolation, and don't dismiss a site just because its DA looks average. Look at the full picture — authority, traffic, relevance, and whether real people are on the other end of that publish button.
This is part of why platforms that clearly disclose both DA and traffic — rather than just flashing an impressive authority score — tend to be more useful to work with. PublishPeeks, for example, lists both metrics for its available sites, which makes it easier to judge a placement on more than just a single number before deciding where to submit your next article.
At the end of the day, a backlink is only as good as the context it sits in. A number on a dashboard is a starting point for research, not a substitute for it.