Page authority

What it is, what it is for and how it works

Table of contents

What Page authority is

Page Authority (PA) is a score originally developed by the company Moz, which measures the ability of a single URL within a domain to rank in search engine results pages.n

This index gives a value from 1 to 100, it is known by the abbreviation PA in the SEO world, and its value gives us an approximate idea of the potential to position a particular URL.

Why it is Important

According to Moz, the higher the PA of a URL, the higher the chances of appearing in the first positions of search engine result pages. Moreover, these chances are multiplied the higher the DA is.
Both metrics make up a powerful pair to predict the positioning potential of a website in Google.
That is why, as SEO consultants, we want this score to be as high as possible, as long as it is not artificially inflated by SPAM.

How to measure page authority

There are several tools that calculate this value automatically:
They all have ways to calculate it and give you an approximate value of this index.

Difference between Domain Domain Authority and Page Authority

While Page Authority measures the strength of a single page, Domain Authority (DA) measures the strength of a domain or subdomain. In this way, the DA gives you aggregated information for the entire domain or project as a whole.

How to increase page authority

Generally, the easiest way to improve this indicator is by obtaining external inbound links pointing to the page in question. The better these links are, the better for the indicator. That is to say, if these links come from authority websites and from topics related to your project, so much the better.

In conclusion:

The page authority score is a very useful metric for SEO consultants that allows you to measure the potential to position a given page in search engines. However, it is a metric that can be easily manipulated and should never be considered as an end in itself.

In other words, if we focus all our efforts on improving the PA of one or several important URLs of our project but neglect everything else, we will be shooting ourselves in the foot.n
As with everything in SEO, details are important but we must never lose sight of the whole.n

Important: DA and PA are indexes or metrics, they are not an SEO factor taken into account by Google or other search engines. Focusing on optimizing these indicators without taking into account the SEO factors will allow you to manipulate these metrics but will not necessarily help to improve your project.

Resources mentioned: