Why do some domains out rank stronger authority domains

[Bondara]

Hi,

If we take the Moz stats into account here, how comes sometimes weak Moz stat domains out ranking strong Moz stat domains?

For example: A inner page with DA56 / PA40 is outranking a Wikipedia inner page with DA100 / PA82.

That's a massive difference basically twice as strong on the Wikipedia page but being out ranking.

In this case I assume the onpage SEO is playing a big part, but can onpage optimisation be that powerful?

And I see this all the time, what SEO factors cause this?

Thanks.

[AlanMosley]

Mat is correct, to put it short.

A weak site about dogs, may beat a strong site about cats for the search term "dogs"

[matbennett]

The slightly glib answer is that google uses over 200 ranking signals, and none of them are DA or PA!

However, think about what you are saying.  If the strongest authority result always ranked first then the results would always be the identical for whatever search you perform.  Ranking is more about relevance than authority (although both play a massive part).

Relevance could be determined by a number of things, and they are not all on-site. Consider the topics of pages that link to the result, the anchor text used, the behaviour of other users who made that search and found particular results useful (or not). These all give a strong indication as to the purpose of a page without taking on-page factors in to account at all... in fact they would even work on a page that was blocking google from crawling it.

Don't underestimate on page / on site factors either.  If it is Google's job to find the "best" result for a given search then the starting point has to be the content at the end of that link.  The more they can do to determine how useful and relevant that content is to the search the easier it is for them to do that job.

What you are  seeing is a search engine working well!

If you haven't seen it before, Google have a great page about how search works.  It is essential reading for anyone with a website:  http://www.google.com/competition/howgooglesearchworks.html