Actually I don't, hence why I came here to ask the question. I think Egol answered it above, they are beatable as small businesses beat them every day. That's what I needed to know, whether they are beatable, how easy/hard is it to beat them as that is a deciding factor as to whether to invest more time and money into SEO or not (money could be better spent on ads for example).

You gave me a philosophical answer that basically said, "you can't change what they do or have so work on what you can change in yourself", which is all fine and dandy but its a loose, vague, cookie cutter spiritual science answer. I mean could I theoretically outrank "British Cancer Research" Website for the keyword cancer "cancer research"? Obviously the answer is yes, using your advice, I can just keep working on my cancer research site, maybe throw a million £ into its SEO and a couple of years and I'll outrank them. We know that, everyone knows that, everyone knows that with hard work and enough time/money/effort you can achieve anything - that is not the question, the question was "how hard/easy is it?" as that is obviously a big factor when considering to continue with that strategy or not.

I mean no disrespect, I think you just misunderstood my question from the start as a "complaining type of question", perhaps you interpreted it as me whinging about the high DA competition and you were trying to encourage me to not focus on that DA. I wasn't complaining, it was a straight up question of how much that high DA is a factor in their site outranking mine as I have built a lot of backlinks to my page, they have none to theirs and therefore must rely on their site DA and traffic.

PA is built with inbound links to that page. That page has 0 backlinks. If it has a 29 PA which I had already checked, it is boosted probably by traffic, internal links to that page which is all a direct cause of Gumtree having massive traffic and DA.

I am not taking it personally, I'm just looking for a reasonable answer as to how much DA weigh in as a factor in rankings? I have a pragmatic approach to things so for example:

Site A has DA30 PA29, my site has DA25 PA28 - This gives me a good idea of what I need to do. I need to study site A's backlink profile, onsite SEO and try to raise my DA to match or beat theirs. Its clear pragmatic approach.

Now example B:

Site A has DA90 and PA 29, my site has DA30 and PA45. - Now for a logical approach, this is much harder to approach pragmatically on how to beat it. Mainly because we know we can never achieve a DA90, and my higher PA isn't overcoming that DA gap. So the question is, how much of a factor is that huge DA? This is important from a business decision perspective because if it means 6 months of high quality backlinks could overcome that, they maybe it's a go, but if it means that I may need to achieve a DA of 60 and PA 60 to outrank that site, then there would be no point. And yes I know DA/PA doesnt mean ranking, but its the closest measuring stick we have to how successful a site will be in ranking.

And I don't mean to be rude but the idea of just "overcoming" something by doing things better in things you can change is a very vague idea. If I want to be the best boxer in the world and I'm 50 years old, you could follow some rara and claim that you can't change your age so you might as well just train and work on what you can change. But fact of the matter is, its nearly impossible to be the best boxer in the world at 50yrs old so although theres a 0.01% chance it could be done, its not a worthwhile investment. And this is why I asked a simple question of how much of a factor that DA is, its to figure out whether its worth investing into more SEO.

And you're right in the context that keyword difficulty doesn't change based on whos above you, however if you are aiming for no.1 position and you are no.2 but no.1 is almost impossible to take over, then yes that keyword is hard. When building niche sites, part of keyword research is to research your competition for that keyword before embarking on that niche site project.

But thank you for taking your time to answer.

I don't hate directories or envy their DA. The pages above me are NOT owned by a person. They are a directory listing.

I say "obviously they have a low PA" because these pages are not owned by anyone therefore they dont have any SEO or owner building traffic or backlinks to them. They are the result of the directory listing. Example: https://www.gumtree.com/removal-services/bournemouth

That URL has 0-1 backlinks according to ahrefs or moz.com site explorer. The page ranks highly literally because the DA of the site is 70. As for researching what they are doing, well thats kinda like saying research what Facebook or yell.com is doing to see if you can achieve the same DA as their site.

And I disagree, who ranks above you is a reflection on keyword difficulty. Obviously if you are trying to rank #1 for the keyword "dog training", you are currently 2nd but no.1 is occupied by Facebook deciding to have a specific dog training page target for your area, it would be next to impossible to overtake them. Hypothetical situation but you get what I mean.

The purpose of the question is not to hate on those sites above me, it's to estimate how difficult directory results are to outrank in search engines. Because they can't be held to the same ranking factors as other personally owned sites because of the huge DA they hold, such as a Forbes article. You can build more links to your page than there are to the Forbes article but the Forbes DA will also weigh in, I guess the question is how much of a factor is the DA over the PA.

My site is at 4th place, 3 places above it is a gumtree (similar to yell, yelp) listing. How can you figure out how difficult it would be outrank those pages? I mean obviously the pages would have low PA and they are top based on the high DA of the site.

This also seems to go back to keyword research and difficulty, when I'm doing keyword research and I see a wikipedia site in top 5 rank, or a yell.com or perhaps an article in forbes.com outranks your site. Typically the problem seems to be Google giving a lot of credit to these pages rankings based on the high DA rather than PA of the pages. How would you gauge the difficulty of that keyword then if the competition are pages with very high DA which is impossible to compete with but low PA?

Thanks