[bhartzer]

Actually, it's never been "a thing". Domain Authority is just a concept that was created by Moz--a metric. This is an interesting read: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/domain-authority/246515/

"No SEO will ever point to a Google patent or research paper to justify the idea that a Site/Domain Authority exists. Wikipedia has published a page about Domain Authority and the footnote links do not cite a single research paper or patent by Google. Not one. According to the footnotes, Wikipedia’s information is largely based on blog posts by SEOs. There are no links to anything official from Google."

[encoderer]

There wouldn't be patents for that sort of thing, it's considered a trade secret.

The Googlebot patent 8,042,112 does describe the existence of a "boost" factor when prioritizing crawl.

[trolleyhacker]

Careful, SEO egos are fragile. They have to keep believing the fantasy. Their lives are built around it. They must so they can keep selling snake oil.