How can authority of the page be higher then authority of the domain?

[SirMax]

In the opensite explorer most of the links that I see have a higher domain authority and lower page authority which makes sense to me because I thought that domain authority is an aggregate of  its pages authority. But apperently I was wrong because sometimes I see that the page authority is greater then its domain? How could that be?

[loopyal]

SirMax,

Domains don't rank. Only pages rank.

The front page of a site is not a domain, it is a page and it ranks on its merits..

If the domain is strong, (the combination of many strong pages), its pages will benefit from the domain strength, so if you add new pages, those pages will benefit, if if no other sites link to it. There are caveats - you could have a strong domain, but there could be problems that prevent the pages from ranking - panda and other duplication are such problems.

[dohertyjf]

No, DA is how well the pages on the website may rank. It is domain specific. PA is how well the individual page may rank, irregardless of DA. We all know that pages on a more trusted site have a better chance of ranking higher for more competitive terms.

Your first example is correct. You could have a PA of 60 and a DA of 10 on a site.

I don't think I agree with your second one though. Page metrics are still better correlated with rankings than domain metrics. It would be better to have a link on a high PA page than a high DA domain, though sites with a higher DA will often have more pages with higher DA.

But with your two, I would say that a DA70/PA30 is better than a DA35/PA40, because a PA30 is not too much less than a PA40, but that DA is powerful.

[SirMax]

So my impression from reading articles about Page and Domain authority as well as impression from your answer is that

Domain authority is an absolute value of how SeoMoz thinks the page ranks in Google

and

Page Authority is a relative value of how much this page is helping this particular domain to rank in Google?

So by that rational you can have some domain with domain authority  rank of 10 and the webpage on that domain with authority rank of 60 because it is the only page that has backlinks.

So then it means that pages with high PA but low DA would have less value for backlinking then pages with somewhat low PA but high DA. Is that true for most of the cases ?

So DA 70 with PA 30 is better then DA35 with PA 40?

[dohertyjf]

Hey Max -

This is a question that we get asked quite often. Let me refer you to these two pages:

What is Domain Authority - http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/domain-authority

What is Page Authority - http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/page-authority

Basically, DA is the strength of the whole domain, based off of links. PA is the strength of the page and likeliness for it to rank according to links. If the page has a bunch of links to it, yet the overall site does not have many more links, the PA of that page will be higher than the DA of the entire site.

Hope this helps.