Are High Domain Authority, Low Page Authority Links Good?
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I recently created a scholarship with the hopes of getting .edu backlinks (as well as helping students in need, of course). So far, I have received 8 followed backlinks from very authoritative .edu sites (70+ domain authorities). The pages that link back to me are the "outside scholarships" pages. I've seen these pages range from having a page authority of 10 to 50+.
For example, I just reached out to Johnson & Wales for a link on their outside scholarships page: http://www.jwu.edu/scholarships-from-outside-agencies/
You can see this page has a PA of 1 and a DA of 73. I'm wondering if Google will see the low page authority and not give me much valuable juice (if any). Are these types of links worth it?
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Is it a good page? Is it helpful to people? Is it related to the link's destination? Would you trust the page? If the search engines disappeared or stopped using links in rankings, would you still want the link?
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Yes but what if domain authority is decent but the page authority is perhaps a 1? Do we skip it?
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Thank you for your response. I will continue to my .edu crusade!
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Thank you Adam, you confirmed everything I was thinking.
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Hi Andrew!
Creating a scholarship is a great way of getting links from sites with a high domain authority. Whether Google gives more weight to .edu (or .gov) links is open to debate but generally speaking .edu sites tend to have a lot of authority due to the large amount of natural links that they attract (although this is not always the case).
One thing to be aware of, Google does not look at page authority (PA) or domain authority (DA) specifically as these are Moz metrics. However, they will give a good indication to the overall authority of a site as these metrics are closely related to PageRank, which is a Google metric.
It is not uncommon for internal pages on a site to have much lower authority metrics than the overall domain. This is not a bad thing and you shouldn't be worried about gaining links on pages that have a lower PA than the overall DA. It may be that these pages are newer and will therefore have less links than the home page resulting in a lower PA. So to answer your question of whether these links are worth it? I would say yes, for sure.
I hope that helps.
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Hello,
Although I am no expert, I have read mixed views on this. While trying to get better links, I read to create a scholarship or donate to get good backlinks.
Matt Cutts said somewhere that Google does not favor EDU or GOV links
Although most of the time these types of links have great DA.
Some people in the Google Product Webmaster forums bashed me for asking about DA as DA is garbage in their eyes.
So that being said, in my research most every site above mine have great DA, but poor PA
So my thinking is that as a whole domain they are awesome, that page though is not linked to very often and or so it does not show trust and authority in Google
I am sure an expert will chime in. Best wishes
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