As Egol mentioned the Domain Authority (DA) is a search engine ranking score developed by Moz that predicts how well a website will rank on search engine result pages (SERPs). https://moz.com/learn/seo/domain-authority
So is a unit measure created by Moz sometimes can be useful sometimes not and of course, has nothing to do with Google
In the other hands, there are many factors involved in ranking a website such as
On page optimization: meta-tittles, meta descriptions, content length, internal backlinks, website performance, internal backlinks, site structure, schemas and so on.
Off-page: which basically means backlinks but is not that simple of who has more backlinks, but to analyze the backlink profile of website you need to keep in mind the type of the link ( follow or no follow) the anchor text distribution, the content of article where you get the backlink and so on.
You mentioned links from sites like times.com well let me tell you something usually this big sites usually give you a no-follow backlink which for SEO purpose is useless. So if you really need to understand what is happening need to make an in-deep analysis of all do-follow backlinks, all the anchor text, all the on-page and so on.