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What Determines Domain and Page Authority?

Are you confused by the Domain Authority and Page Authority metrics on the report we provided to you? Are you trying to understand what determines these scores, and how you can raise them? On this page, you can learn a little bit more about why you earned the scores you did, and what these scores really mean.

Domain Authority (DA) and Page Authority (PA) are two metrics created by Moz, a provider of SEO tools. You can read a little more about these two metrics and how Moz came up with them on this page. Both link back to the power of a reputable backlink profile in SEO and demonstrate why it’s important to increase your SEO authority via backlinks.

Your website’s strength vs. other sites

DA and PA do not necessarily symbolize how good your SEO efforts are. You may have the best content in the world, be targeting the right keywords, and be making thousands of dollars a day due to being highly visible in search engines, but still have a low DA.

What DA and PA do tell you is how “strong” your website is compared to others. Basically, when you search for a topic and receive three pages on the same topic, the page with the highest PA is the one Google sees as the strongest; the domain with the highest DA is the one Google sees as the strongest. These are the ones most likely to rank the highest (although not necessarily).

The number of links you have

A very big part of DA and PA is based on links. Moz determines these numbers based on incoming links from other sites. Generally speaking, the more links you have, the better — although low quality, spammy links probably won’t do your website any good.

You will often find that websites with very high DA also have a very high number of incoming links. Additionally, individual pages that have a high PA will typically obtain that because they have received links (pointing directly at that specific page).

How much you can be trusted

Moz uses another one of their own metrics, called MozTrust, to influence DA and PA. They explain it as such:

We determine MozTrust by calculating link “distance” between a given page and a seeded trust source on the Internet. Think of this like six degrees of separation: the closer you are linked to a trusted website, the more trust you have yourself.

Essentially, if you are only one or two link hops away from a trusted website (like the NASA site or CNN), you are more likely to be trusted than a site that is seven or eight hops away.

This, in a nutshell, is how DA and PA are determined. Many tools and individuals rely on these two numbers to determine how trustworthy you are, and whether or not your site is worth linking or working with.

How do I increase my PA or DA?

Links are the key to improving the scores associated with your page and domain authority. The more high-quality links you have, and the closer those links take you to the “trusted” seeds in the MozTrust database, the higher those metrics will rise.

Keep in mind that your PA and DA do not have an actual impact on your SEO — they will correlate, but can not change your ranking in search engines. So just keep in mind that PA and DA matter for different reasons than the rest of your SEO.

Do you have any questions about the page and domain authority that this page didn’t answer? Or are you looking for answers to questions about your website grade that you can’t find in the resources section on our website? Please don’t hesitate to reach out to us — we’d be happy to help you in any way we can!

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