Difference Between Domain Authority and Page Authority
Last Updated on 14th September 2023 by Ajmer Singh
You’ve probably heard about page and domain authority on various SEO blogs, but what do these metrics really mean?
I’m going to break down the difference between the two, and show you why they are so important for SEO.
There are several metrics used by SEO experts to help rank a site, amongst them are domain authority and page authority.
These metrics help in understanding what domain will rank for a particular keyword, which will outrank the others.
Knowing how to use these metrics will help bring your website to a larger audience.
To know the difference between domain authority and page authority, we will have to study them individually.
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What is Domain Authority?
Domain Authority is a metric developed by MOZ that determines how well a site will rank on search engine results.
It is rated in a range of 1-100.
It measures the authority/power of a website, which means the higher the domain authority, the higher it is for a site to rank on search engines.
The idea of wanting to have a higher DA is so you can outrank your competitors.
The competition is against your competitors.
However, you must know that it is not necessary that you reach the threshold of 100.
So far your DA is higher than that of your competitor, be sure that your content will do well.
Domain Authority works by combining all of the link equity (the “link juice”) from every page on a given website.
It’s like a pie chart that tells you how much of your site’s overall ranking ability comes from each page.
This allows marketers to drill down into the pages that are most important for their SEO strategy.
This is especially useful when looking at link prospecting, content promotion or web page analysis.
For example, you might want to promote a single piece of content to make it more visible on your site.
However, the Page Authority metric tells you that the blog post doesn’t have much “weight” in terms of domain authority because none of its pages is linking out to authority sites.
Thus, there’s no established backlink profile for your website to tap into.
And no real reason for Google to deem this particular piece relevant compared to other results ranking for the same search query.
Keep in mind that Domain Authority will vary between websites so each website should be analyzed separately.
Domain authority is a measure of how well a particular website will rank in search engine results.
It’s calculated by using the MozRank and MozTrust metrics.
The Domain Authority of any site on the web can be estimated by Moz’s Site Explorer.
You would enter the URL, and it gives you an estimate of your domain authority.
Domain authorities are given a score out of 100, where higher is better. There are some ballpark estimates that webmasters go by:
* 10-30 – low or negative trust flow/citation flow, not likely to ever rank well in Google for their top keywords
* 30-50 – low trust flow/citation flow, unlikely to rank highly soon but more likely than those below them
* 50-70 – average or slightly above average trust flow/citation flow, might rank for their top keywords
* 70-80 – above average trust flow/citation flow, can be expected to soon start ranking highly for their top keywords
* 80+ – very high trust flow/citation flow, are already ranking highly for their target keywords and will continue to do so in future.
As you can see it is a great way to tell how your site may rank on Google search results pages.
There is a lot of debate over whether it is a good way to measure the quality or worth of sites.
This has been going on for over a decade, but there really isn’t any way to settle it except with your own experience.
In general, though, higher-quality sites tend to have higher domain authority.
Using tools like Moz can help you assess your own site’s authority so that if it is low, you know why. If it is high, you know what to keep doing.
How is Domain Authority scored?
Domain authority is rated on a score of 0 to 100 via a logarithmic scale.
This means building a domain from 1 to 10 is easier than building from 90 to 100.
Every site you see online with a high DA started with a DA of 1.
How to check Domain Authority?
Checking the DA of a site is quite easy.
Thankfully, there are several tools online that can be used to check the DA of a site and they include:
- Moz
- Ahref
- Semrush
How can I improve my Domain Authority?
There are several measures you can put in place to help improve your domain authority.
Measures like link building, working on your on-page SEO and technical SEO, building your social media presence, dealing with crawling and indexing issues, and much more.
However, the measure you should work on most importantly is link building.
Link building is the sole proprietor for an increase in domain authority.
You can choose to build links naturally, using the outreach method, or by guest posting.
What is a good Domain Authority?
Domain authority is a relative measure, it has to do with your competitor.
We can simply say that a DA is good if it is higher than your competitors and it is bad if it is lower than your competitors.
For example, if all your competitor has DAs between 70-80, you will want to aim higher.
But if their DAs are between 11-20, you will want to have a DA of 21.
DA is of importance when it comes to ranking on SERPs.
So the idea of aiming to have a high DA should be because you want to outrank your competitors.
And take first place, that is the only benefit of having high DA.
Now that we have successfully studied what DA means, let’s proceed to PA
What is Page Authority?
Page Authority is also a metric developed by MOZ to determine how well a page will rank on SERP.
It has a shared similarity with DA except that it is more focused on a specific page instead of the entire website.
Like DA, PA is also rated from 0 to 100, with a high score depicting a higher ranking on SERP.
Page Authority uses data from Moz’s web index, including backlinks, engagement signals like,
time on page or social shares, and “link equity,” or the number of links pointing to a given webpage.
It was designed to measure the topical relevance of any given URL.
It learns over time which pages are important within a website (and thus should be more highly ranked) by looking at its link profile.
This means that if you are linking out frequently to other websites in your niche that have high authority, your domain authority will improve.
On the contrary, if you have links or mentions that point to your page from other highly competitive websites (high DA and/or PA) with little value (low PageRank and/or TF), then Page Authority will score accordingly.
Page authority is a metric for ranking a page on a website.
It is one of the most important factors that search engines consider when indexing and ranking websites.
It can be used to determine how well-linked your content is, how popular the pages are linking to you, and what kind of sites link to your site.
Page authority was created by SEO company Moz back in 2012 as a way to measure a single web page against another – or more specifically,
how well a specific piece of content will rank against another piece of content in Google’s search results.
This helped them give their customers better insights on things such as keyword research for an individual web page,
understanding how competitive certain keywords were, and knowing which strategies would work best for their own sites.
Moz built its own algorithm that assigns a score to each web page or piece of content they look at, and all that is required for the site to rank is its page authority score.
This page authority score can range anywhere from one to 100.
With this information in hand, Moz created what they call an “authority metric,” which basically ranks sites based on how well-linked they are.
Moz’s tool calculates the number of linking root domains (like Wikipedia) plus external links, anchor text (the clickable words in your link),
and other ‘link signals’ like social shares per page on any given website.
These raw numbers are then used by SEO consultants to calculate the overall “page authority” of any given page.
Inside the Moz tool, it is measured on a 100 point scale where 1 would be the lowest possible score and 100 would represent the highest achievement.
Anything over 30 for an individual page can be considered ‘good,’ while pages with PA’s of 40 or more are exceptional and highly desirable.
How is Page Authority scored?
The ratings of PA are similar to that of DA.
Page authority is also rated on a scale of 1-100, which means it is easier to move from 1-10 than to move from 80-90.
All pages with a very high PA started from 1.
Technically, PA has the same functionality as DA, except that Page authority does not take on-page SEO into consideration.
Its directive is focused on link building.
So the higher your PA, the higher it is to rank for a page on SERP.
What is a good Page Authority?
PA is relative just like DA, it has more to do with your competitor.
We can simply say that a PA is good so long it is higher than that of your competitors.
Your target should be that you have a higher PA than your competitors.
How to check for Page Authority?
You can make use of the MOZ, SEmrush, and Ahrefs to check for the PA of your site.
Domain authority and page authority are closely related metrics.
However, the DA score predicts how well an entire domain will rank on SERPS while the PA score determines how a specific page will rank.
In addition to this, to improve your DA score, you need to work on your Onpage SEO,
whereas PA does not take on-page SEO, keyword optimization, into account.
Page authority is focused more on link building
How to improve PA and DA?
To improve DA and PA, working on your link profile is important.
For your PA, you get external links from high profiled websites and include them in the page you are targeting, this, in turn, builds your PA.
while for DA, you build links either naturally or via outreach methods, you work on your on-page SEO and lots more.
Why do the PA and DA of a website change?
There are several reasons why the DA and PA of a website change and they include:
- If there is a drop in the ranking of the site linking to you.
- When Google detects that links earned are through black hat SEO.
- If there are toxic backlinks linking to your domain.
- Your site has not been crawled since you build links.
Wrapping Up
We hope you have learned the difference between domain authority and page authority.
Remember that both metrics are important for the growth of your blog and just one major factor strikes a difference between them.
Domain authority deals with the entire website, while page authority is specific to pages.
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