There are very few ranking systems available on the internet to measure the comparative ranking of a website. Earlier, website owners used to measure the rank using Google PageRank. However, Google discontinued the ranking system due to the misuse for backlinking purposes. For example, you can buy an expired domain with high PageRank and park it or publish some content to sell links. After the disappearance of PageRank, people still uses Alexa rank and Moz DA and PA for getting a measurement. Alex rank is easy to understand which you can simply check by going to their website. In this article, we will explain what is Moz DA and PA and how it can influence domain value.
Checking Moz DA and PA
You can use Moz free domain analysis tool to get the DA of any website.
However, the free tool can only help for checking up to 3 domains and you should get a premium Moz Pro account in order to check more domains. Alternatively, you can register for a free account to use the API for limited domains or use Link Explorer tool to find DA / PA. If you want to create an account or upgrade to premium, then the best way is to use third-party websites that uses the API to offer DA/PA checking service.
What is Domain Authority (DA)?
DA is an indicative score to predict how well a domain or website will perform on the SERPs. DA score also has a 1 to 100 scale, and the higher chance to rank well linked to higher DA scores.
Moz considers several factors in order to get the DA scores such as the number of total links and linking root domains. All these factors are then computed into the whole DA score. Moz uses the DA score when making websites comparison or following the website ranking strength over a period.
What is Page Authority (PA)?
PA has to do with the prediction of how well a particular webpage will rank on the SERP. Moz uses a score called Page Authority to calculate this prediction. The scores are between one and 100, the higher the score the greater the ranking ability.
PA depends on information gathered from the Moz web index along with several other factors such as Domain Authority (DA). It employs the use of a machine learning model to pinpoint the algorithm that is the best match with rankings throughout thousands of search engine result pages. The prediction is weighed against the pages and used in a calculation to provide the PA scores.
Note that Google does not use DA or PA as a metric to determine rankings on search engines as DA does not affect SERPs.
Domain Authority vs. Page Authority
In the case of DA, the whole subdomain or domain ranking strength is predicted while for the PA just a certain page ranking strength is predicted. Nevertheless, the two authorities are calculated using the same method. The two authorities are very much alike focusing on domain and page level metrics.
How Authority Score Determined?
Moz measures the DA or PA score on a logarithmic scale of one hundred points. Therefore, it is much easier to improve the score from 20 to 30 but hard to improve it to 80 from 70. Remember, Moz regularly updates DA and PA algorithm, as a result, the DA or PA scores fluctuates periodically
What Makes a “good” Authority?
Given the way DA or PA calculation is done, the best way to use it is as a comparative metric instead of using it as a concrete score. This is similar to viewing search results in Google that the top pages have more important link profiles than the rest. As DA and PA are comparative tools, we can’t say there is actually a bad or good score.
Typically, a website that has a huge number of external links of the highest quality like websites such as Google or Wikipedia will be found at the upper part of the DA scale. On the other hand, sites and companies that have lower inbound links may expectedly score lower on the DA scale. Fresh sites often start out on one on the DA scale.
How Do I Influence Domain and Page Authority?
Influencing a DA or PA directly is quite hard as it consists of a combination of metrics as well as link data that affect the authority score. This is an intentional move as the metric is aimed at estimating the level of competitiveness of a particular website in Google search results. Given that Google uses several factors to rank a site, finding a metric for calculation will also involve several factors as well.
A tip on how to best influence the DA or PA metric has to do with making improvements in your overall SEO, specifically, focusing on link building to get more links to your website from the rest of your web pages that are well linked.
What Causes a Change in Authority?
As we discuss earlier DA and PA are a result of several calculations and metrics, so identifying the specific cause of authority changes can be difficult. Below or some of the factors that can result in increase or decrease in the authority score:
- If the domain has links from from low quality domain or nofollow which is of no use in Google ranking.
- If Moz does not have the domain’s link profile growth is yet in the index.
- The highest-authority websites went through significant link growth, distorting the process of scaling.
- If your DA is at the bottom part of the scoring scale and as a result, it has more by fluctuation in the scaling process.
- In a case, where Moz crawled (and capture in its index) less or extra linking domains then previously captured.
In order to properly get a grip of fluctuation in PA and DA scores, it is necessary to understand that the metrics used are not drawn from a vacuum. Instead, they are based on several negative and positive factors that mean that in a situation a particular website work on improving its SEO, the Authority scores may not necessarily reflect such changes.
Conclusion
DA and PA operate in a similar way as they both use a 100-point scale. The Authority score is just a pointer to the predicted performance of your website, but the score reflected may not necessarily mean your website is doing bad or good either. That is because after every update to the calculation algorithm, the recalculations that take place could see the Authority score of a particular website or webpage go down regardless of whether the website or webpage has improved their link quality as well as quantity. Therefore, it is crucial to know that the best way to use Authority scores is as a comparative tool and not as an actual measure.
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