What is page authority? PA is a score developed by Moz that predicts the likelihood that your page will rank at the top of the search results.
What Is Page Authority and What Does It Measure?
Page authority (PA) is a score developed by the SEO company Moz. It estimates how well a page will rank in organic search results.
PA uses a scale from 1 to 100: the higher the score, the more likely your page will rank high.
The scale is logarithmic rather than linear. That means that as you go up the scale, each step up becomes harder and harder. For example, it’s much harder to go from PA 70 to 80 than from PA of 20 to 30.
Page authority helps you assess how well your web page is going to rank. When you look at the search results, take note of the PA of the top ranking pages.
How Is Page Authority Calculated?
The precise signals used to calculate page authority are not known outside of Moz. But it is believed to be based on at least 40 different factors.
These factors include things like:
- number of unique domains linking to a page
- do follow’ links vs ‘no follow’ links
- how recently the page was updated
- age of the domain
Where Can You See Your PA Score?
Many SEO tools show page authority for the top ranking pages.
For example, here is a SERP analysis in KWFinder that shows the PA for each page in the search results:
But you can also see Page Authority by installing the free MozBar chrome extension.
With MozBar installed in your browser, this is how the search results will appear:
You can also check the PA of top ranking pages in Moz’s SERP Analysis tool. The tool shows you the PA for the pages that rank for that keyword.
What Is a Good PA Score?
So what is a good page authority score? There is no ideal PA that you need in order to succeed with SEO. That’s because it’s relative to the page authority of the other pages in the search results.
Let’s say the top ranking page for your keyword has a PA of 25, and you have a page authority of 27. You have a good PA score for that keyword.
But if the top ranking page had a PA of 45, a PA of 25 would not be great.
So it’s relative – it depends on the PA of the pages that you’re competing with in the search results.
Is PA a Ranking Factor?
Page authority is not in itself a ranking factor.
For example, Google does not use page authority in deciding how to rank pages.
But page authority is a measure of things that are ranking factors, such as number, quality, and relevance of backlinks.
Page Authority vs PageRank
People sometimes confuse page authority with PageRank. But they are completely different.
PageRank is a Google metric that uses a scale of 1 to 10. It measures the number of incoming backlinks a page has, and the PageRank of those linking pages.
How To Increase Your Page Authority
It is difficult to directly influence the PA score of a particular page because it is based on so many different factors.
But one factor in particular can help lift your page authority: links from other websites.
Links from other websites pass link equity or ‘link juice’ to your page. How much link equity is passed on depends on the domain authority of the other website and page authority of the linking page.
Within your own website, you can increase a page’s page authority by linking to it from other pages that have higher page authority.
Page Authority vs Domain Authority
DA and PA are similar in what they measure. While page authority predicts how well a particular page will rank in the search results, domain authority estimates how well a domain as a whole will perform in the search results.
As you might expect, DA and PA affect each other.
For example, a single ‘do follow’ link from a relevant website with DA of 90+ to your home page would lift the page authority of all pages across your website.
On the other hand, as your web pages gain in page authority, that feeds back to your domain and lifts the DA of your website.
Conclusion
Page authority is simply an indication of how well a page is likely to perform in organic search.
It is not a ranking factor in itself but reflects things that are ranking factors, such as the number, quality and relevance of your backlinks.
Because page authority itself does not cause a page to rank higher, there’s no need to focus obsessively on PA. It’s much more useful to focus on the factors that affect page authority such as link profile and quality of content.
