What are Page and Domain Authority?

What are Page and Domain Authority

Page Authority, or PA, and Domain Authority, or DA, are 0–100 scoring systems developed by MOZ that aim to assess the quality of a site’s links.

They’re based on MOZ’s Mozscape Web Index, which includes metrics like number of links, MozRank, and MozTrust. In short, Page and Domain Authority estimate a site’s trustworthiness in the eyes of search engines by evaluating how many sites link to it and the quality of those linking sites.

How do Page and Domain Authority differ?

Page Authority measures the link strength of a single page, while Domain Authority measures the combined link strength of an entire site.

Domain Authority is basically the sum of a site’s PA scores.

A high PA score means that a particular subpage has lots of strong links.

A high DA score means that the entire site has lots of strong links.

What is MozRank?

MozRank measures how popular a link is. The more people share the same link, the more popular it’s considered.

A link’s popularity can be boosted when links are shared from one site to another. Here, quality beats quantity.

A link from a well-known site like Iltalehti.fi or Helsingin Sanomat is worth hundreds of times more than one from a blog about peeling potatoes.

The linking page should also be on a site that covers the same topic area.

MozRank is scored on a 0–10 scale. Worldwide, the most common score for a link is 3.

What is MozTrust?

MozTrust is a global link-trust score developed by Moz.

It’s similar to MozRank, but instead of measuring a link’s popularity, MozTrust measures its trustworthiness — whether a link comes from a reputable source or from spam.

A trusted site would typically be one that ranks at the top of its field in search results.

Where can I see my pages’ Page and Domain Authority?

You can install the free MozBar extension for Chrome or Firefox — it shows PA and DA scores for any site, along with related details.

How can Page and Domain Authority be used in SEO?

PA and DA scores can help estimate how a site’s links affect its presence in search results.

However, these numbers alone don’t tell you exactly where a link will rank in search results. Placement also depends on on-page SEO — how well the page’s content and description match the user’s query.

Example query: “flower shop helsinki”

Why isn’t Kaivokukka.fi ranking first even though its PA and DA are higher than, say, Kampinkukka.fi? Because Kaivokukka’s site is poorly optimized for search.

Compare Kaivokukka’s search listing to others.

The title is too long, gets cut off and doesn’t match the query well.
The meta description is too short and doesn’t include the search term.

There are also issues on Kaivokukka’s website itself:

The page content is too short
The page content doesn’t match the search term closely enough.

With a few small edits, Kaivokukka could likely move up a couple of positions.

Summary and recap

Use PA and DA scores when you want to compare the link strength of your site to your competitors.

PA and DA scores are just tools to help with search engine optimization.

A site with a high DA but low PA may rank well in search results, yet it can be overtaken relatively easily with targeted SEO.

What are Page and Domain Authority?