Could be the PA greater than the DA?
-
Hello users MOZ:
I have a question about page and domain authority. It is OK that sometimes PA is greater than the DA? I think that's not right, but it happens in some domains, for example in the attached image. -
So glad I could help!
-
Thank you very much for your reply, I really clarified
-
Eric and Andrew are both right on this one; PA can definitely be higher than DA in certain situations.
PA is a measure of how likely a page is to rank against any other page in our index, while DA is the same thing for a domain rather than just one page. You can definitely have one page on a domain that ranks well while all of the other pages aren't doing so great.
Both DA and PA are calculated based on a large number of metrics so, while they aren't mutually exclusive, they aren't directly correlated either. DA is taken into account when calculating PA, so a low DA could bring down a high PA a bit, but it doesn't negate all of the other metrics that would make the PA high.
I hope this helps to clear things up!
-
Thanks Eric, lot better said than I put it
-
Yes, I actually see this quite often for smaller sites. DA is looking at the entire site, while PA is only that page so if that one page is really awesome then yes it will have a PA higher than the overall site. Typically that will happen with the homepage or a really great piece of content, since both would attract the most links to your site. Those pages would grow to have a higher PA, which would be a strong indicator these are important for the overall health of the site.
So if you have a page that has a high PA, you can spread that by having a solid internal linking structure within your website. Link from the high PA page to other important pages for your site, and you'll see the PA of the linked pages grow.
-
It can happen that PA is higher than DA on some sites but from my understanding of this both factors can be important and it depends on the situation. They are both measures of ranking power.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
My Blog DA Decreased
Hey! I am running a blog named prowatersoftener.com Today DA of my blog decreased what could be the reason Please help me what about issue?
Link Explorer | | TOFHA0545150 -
Why is my DA dropping rapidly?
My DA dropped 4 points in a week. I check the discovered and lost linking domains in the same time range, and i have more discovered than lost, and the DAs of those lost/linking are all comparable. How could this be?
Link Explorer | | RyanMeighan0 -
Our Domains DA has dropped from 52 to 17
Hi,
Link Explorer | | JudyLam
Our domain's DA (www.tricorglobal.com) has dropped drastically from 52 to 17 on Mar 2019. And has only gone up to 21 now. Is there a reason why this happened. On the other hand, our competitor's score has increased. Is there a valid reason for this? How can I find out what is hurting our DA and how can I fix this?1 -
Mozbar have no PA and DA within the bar for the last week.
I don't know how technical I need to get here, but the mozbar has shown no data for PA and DA for over a week now. Also, the bar tells me to login within the search query version of the mozbar... Even after I have logged in many times and the cach remembers me on the login page. I would love some assistance here from Moz directly.
Link Explorer | | aaronmoskowitz1 -
DA/PA Fluctuations: How to Interpret, Apply, & Understand These ML-Based Scores
Howdy folks, Every time we do an index update here at Moz, we get a tremendous number of questions about Domain Authority (DA) and Page Authority (PA) scores fluctuating. Typically, each index (which release approximately monthly), many billions of sites will see their scores go up, while others will go down. If your score has gone up or down, there are many potential influencing factors: You've earned relatively more or less links over the course of the last 30-90 days.
Link Explorer | | randfish
Remember that, because Mozscape indices take 3-4 weeks to process, the data collected in an index is between ~21-90 days old. Even on the day of release, the newest link data you'll see was crawled ~21 days ago, and can go as far back as 90 days (the oldest crawlsets we include in processing). If you've done very recent link growth (or shrinkage) that won't be seen by our index until we've crawled and processed the next index. You've earned more links, but the highest authority sites have grown their link profile even more
Since Domain and Page Authority are on a 100-page scale, the very top of that represents the most link-rich sites and pages, and nearly every index, it's harder and harder to get these high scores and sites, on average, that aren't growing their link profiles substantively will see PA/DA drops. This is because of the scaling process - if Facebook.com (currently with a DA of 100) grows its link profile massively, that becomes the new DA 100, and it will be harder for other sites that aren't growing quality links as fast to get from 99 to 100 or even from 89 to 90. This is true across the scale of DA/PA, and makes it critical to measure a site's DA and a page's PA against the competition, not just trended against itself. You could earn loads of great links, and still see a DA drop due to these scaling types of features. Always compare against similar sites and pages to get the best sense of relative performance, since DA/PA are relative, not absolute scores. The links you've earned are from places that we haven't seen correlate well with higher Google rankings
PA/DA are created using a machine-learning algorithm whose training set is search results in Google. Over time, as Google gets pickier about which types of links it counts, and as Mozscape picks up on those changes, PA/DA scores will change to reflect it. Thus, lots of low quality links or links from domains that don't seem to influence Google's rankings are likely to not have a positive effect on PA/DA. On the flip side, you could do no link growth whatsoever and see rising PA/DA scores if the links from the sites/pages you already have appear to be growing in importance in influencing Google's rankings. We've done a better or worse job crawling sites/pages that have links to you (or don't)
Moz is constantly working to improve the shape of our index - choosing which pages to crawl and which to ignore. Our goal is to build the most "Google-shaped" index we can, representative of what Google keeps in their main index and counts as valuable/important links that influence rankings. We make tweaks aimed at this goal each index cycle, but not always perfectly (you can see that in 2015, we crawled a ton more domains, but found that many of those were, in fact, low quality and not valuable, thus we stopped). Moz's crawlers can crawl the web extremely fast and efficiently, but our processing time prevents us from building as large an index as we'd like and as large as our competitors (you will see more links represented in both Ahrefs and Majestic, two competitors to Mozscape that I recommend). Moz calculates valuable metrics that these others do not (like PA/DA, MozRank, MozTrust, Spam Score, etc), but these metrics require hundreds of hours of processing and that time scales linearly with the size of the index, which means we have to stay smaller in order to calculate them. Long term, we are building a new indexing system that can process in real time and scale much larger, but this is a massive undertaking and is still a long time away. In the meantime, as our crawl shape changes to imitate Google, we may miss links that point to a site or page, and/or overindex a section of the web that points to sites/pages, causing fluctuations in link metrics. If you'd like to insure that a URL will be crawled, you can visit that page with the Mozbar or search for it in OSE, and during the next index cycle (or, possibly 2 index cycles depending on where we are in the process), we'll crawl that page and include it. We've found this does not bias our index since these requests represent tiny fractions of a percent of the overall index (<0.1% in total). My strongest suggestion if you ever have the concern/question "Why did my PA/DA drop?!" is to always compare against a set of competing sites/pages. If most of your competitors fell as well, it's more likely related to relative scaling or crawl biasing issues, not to anything you've done. Remember that DA/PA are relative metrics, not absolute! That means you can be improving links and rankings and STILL see a falling DA score, but, due to how DA is scaled, the score in aggregate may be better predictive of Google's rankings. You can also pay attention to our coverage of Google metrics, which we report with each index, and to our correlations with rankings metrics. If these fall, it means Mozscape has gotten less Google-shaped and less representative of what influences rankings. If they rise, it means Mozscape has gotten better. Obviously, our goal is to consistently improve, but we can't be sure that every variation we attempt will have universally positive impacts until we measure them. Thanks for reading through, and if you have any questions, please leave them for us below. I'll do my best to follow up quickly.13 -
"Https://" version of my home page has PA of 39, while the "https://www" version has a PA of 43?
Why would the "https://" version of my home page have a PA of 39, while the "https://www" version has a PA of 43? Is Google seeing this page as two different pages? I'm seeing different linking domains to each. What can I do to unify the two? There is already a 301 redirect in place.
Link Explorer | | jmorganarnold0 -
Attaining DA, PA and Links Count
It's been more than 6 months since my site has been up. I have submitted the site to several online directories. However, I still cant attain a PA and DA. The link count is also not showing. Can someone please help to explain. The site URL is www.toymana.com
Link Explorer | | kookabara0 -
OSE Stats - Number of Unique C IP's and PA/DA keep going up and down. Why?
For the past 3 months (if not more) I have been checking my sites stats on OSE and have noticed drastic decreases and increases in unique C-IP's, ranging from 600 to 1200. I have also noticed the PA & DA going up and down by 5 points. We have a talented team that work hard to market our business ethically with strong content and PR relationships, white-hat link building all the way, active social media and a dedicated on-site technical team. The data from MajesticSEO seems to be a lot more steady and consistent. Why is OSE showing drastic changes in 1 to 2 week intervals? Many thanks Ross
Link Explorer | | David_Connor0