Realistic expectations to increase domain authority

[WebMarkets]

A) what is a realistic timeline to increase a websites domain authority by 20 points?

B) what are the most important factors to increase a websites domain authority?

[Tonger]

Years? I saw 3 competitor companies boosting (alle-noten.de, notenbuch.de, stretta-music.com) their DA from 30 to 50 within a couple of weeks.
Obviously concentratation on what the customers wants gets more and more irrelevant. Instead the massive purchse of links is key.

[WebMarkets]

Actually, 27 to 47.

[julie-getonthemap]

You've left off a very important fact.

Are you trying to go from 0 to 20 or from 20 to 40. The time required is completely different.

[DonnaDuncan]

What is a realistic timeline to increase a website's domain authority by 20 points?

Years. Domain authority uses a logarithmic scale like the Richter scale used to measure earthquakes. Every notch you move up the rung takes exponentially more time, discipline, creativity, outreach, and energy.

If you're asking the question b/c you have to set expectations with someone, I'm with Gaston and would suggest you set business goals and a realistic timeline to reach them versus relying on a metric that correlates with high rankings. Think leads and downloads. If it's an e-commerce site, think sales. Things that are easier to measure and explain to the business.

What are the most important factors to increase a website's domain authority?

Someone from Moz would have to answer that. Here is the page on their site that best explains it. My understanding is the domain authority metric tries to mirror Google's interpretation of a website's importance and would expect incoming links and their sources to be given considerable weight in the calculation.

[GastonRiera]

Hi Kris,

This brings a bigger question: Why do you need a 20 point increase ?

You MUST know that having higher metrics will not make you rank higher. It will increase the chances of ranking higher and impress your clients/supervisors.
In my opinion, you should not focus in metrics, such as PA or DA. Focus in doing what google wants.

To answer your questions, just get (somehow) links with higher PA/DA than your page and make your link profile to have more and more of those links. Timeline? a few per week for the entire life.
Remember, moz's metrics look at the most, the backlinks pointing to your page and the links in the pages related to the backlink and you website... So the key in Moz' s metrics: BACKLINKS!

Hope I've helped.
GR.