How to Use Domain Authority, Page Authority, and Link Metrics
How can you use link metrics like Domain Authority and Page Authority with your other SEO data in a useful way? What do they signify, and when and when do they make sense to think about? Rand addresses these and other issues in today’s Whiteboard Friday. This gives you the information you need to better understand and do your SEO job.
A lot of you have written to us at Moz over the years, and I talk to people at a lot of conferences and events who say things like, “I’ve been measuring my link building activity with DA,” or “Hey, I got a high DA link.” I want to make sure that you know when to use metrics like DA or PA or a raw link count metric, like the number of linking root domains or something like Spam Score or a traffic estimation.
So I’m going to give you a quick overview of these three: Page Authority, Domain Authority, and connecting root domains. Page Authority and Domain Authority are not as easy as they seem. So I believe that’s a good idea. After that, we’ll talk about when to utilize each measure. So, in the realm of SEO, there are three main things that people utilize link metrics for. Let’s go over them.
Page Authority
So, to start, Page Authority is basically a lot of different little metrics that I’ve written down here. These include linking URLs, linking root domains, MozRank, MozTrust, linking subdomains, anchor text, linking pages, followed links, no-followed links, 301s, 302s, new versus old links, TLD, domain name, branded domain mentions, Spam Score, and many, many more.
In short, PA is the sum of all the metrics we could think of from our link index, which we then put into a model with some training data. In this situation, the training data is clearly Google search results. This is because we want the site Authority score to be a way to predict how highly a site would rank in Google search results based just on link data.
This is just utilizing link data, not any on-page data, content data, interaction or visit data, patterns, branding, or entity matches. So, we take the link profile and the domain that the site is on and use them to figure out all we can about the page. Then we add that information to the training data. We have a machine learning model that learns from Google search results and tries to make the best model it can.
By the way, that model gets rid of some of this things since it’s not helpful and adds a lot of this stuff, like vectors or different qualities of each one. So it may say something like, “Oh, anchor text distribution, that’s not helpful at all, but Domain Authority sorted by the root domains that have more than 500 links to them.”” I’m just making things up, right? But you could put those kinds of filters on this data and make really complicated models, which is what machine learning is meant to accomplish.
The only thing we need to worry about is that this is pretty much the best predictive score we can get from the links. So it may be used for a lot of different things. If we want to know how well we believe this site may rank without taking into account any links, PA is an excellent model. That’s good data for that.
Domain Authority
Domain Authority is when you understand the PA model and think, “Okay, I get it. Use machine learning to compare Google’s results and come up with the best predictive score for ranking in Google.” At the root domain level, DA is simply the PA model. So just root domains, not subdomains, which is strange. For instance, it can’t tell the difference between randfishkin.blogspot.com and www.blogspot.com. But it’s clear that a link from
www.blogspot.com is worth a lot more than one from my own subdomain on Blogspot, Tumblr, WordPress, or any of these other hosted subdomains. That’s a bit of an edge situation that the DA doesn’t do a very good job of supporting, however.
It’s helpful for predicting how highly a domain’s pages will rank in Google since it works really well. So it gets rid of all the information on the page, but it still works at the domain level. That can be really helpful.
Linking Root Domain
Then connecting root domains is the easiest thing to accomplish. This is simply a list of all the different root domains that have at least one link on them that goes to a specific page or site. So, when I say that URL A has 410 connecting root domains, I mean that there are 410 domains that have at least one link going to URL A.
I haven’t informed you yet if they are followed or not. Unless otherwise stated, this is usually a mix of the two. That’s why you should constantly double-check: even a link that doesn’t follow might get into the connecting root domains. If you use Ahrefs, Majestic, or Moz and click over the small question mark symbol next to any statistic, it will inform you what it contains and what it doesn’t.
When to use which metric(s)
Okay. So, what do we do with these?
A lot of people keep track of their month-over-month link building success, and for that, I wouldn’t recommend making DA your main one. There are a few causes for this. So, Moz’s index, which is the only item that can presently figure out DA or a machine learning-like model among the main link data toolsets, only gets updated once a month. So, if you’re writing your report before the DA has been updated since the previous link index, it might be really annoying.
Now, I want to announce that in just a few months, a new index will come out that will replace Mozscape and do all of these things considerably faster. A lot of people have been asking for it, I know. It’s on its way.
But for now, I suggest using:
1. Linking root domains, the number of linking root domains, and how that number has changed over time.
2. Organic rankings for the keywords you want to target. I realize this isn’t a straight link metric, but it truly helps you understand how those connections have been doing since they were damaged. If you’re tracking month to month, Google undoubtedly found and tallied whatever months you have in a 20- or 30-day period within a few days of discovering them. Google is also fairly excellent at indexing almost the full web in a week or two. So this is a good way to see how your link building strategy has aided your organic search campaign.
3. The spread of Domain Authority. In this scenario, I believe Domain Authority may be helpful. I wouldn’t choose it first or second, but I believe it should definitely be on a link building performance report. It’s good to know that you’re obtaining high DA links. It’s a nice way to sort things out by saying, “These are, for the most part, more important and authoritative sites.”
4. I also appreciate the Spam Score since if you’ve been developing a lot of links, Domain
Authority doesn’t drop its score or punish you for having a high Spam Score. It will say, “Hey, this is a site with a lot of DA and good-looking links that we trust, but it also looks like spam to us.”” For instance, you could find that something has a DA of 60 but a Spam Score of 7 or 8, which might be a little worrying. When you get to 9, 10, or 11, I start to worry a lot.
I believe this is a question that many have. They look at their own links and say, “Okay, we have these links, or our competitor has these links.” Which ones are giving me the greatest value? If you can obtain it, for example, if it’s a connection to you, the best one is going to be…
1. Traffic that is real. If a link from a site or page is delivering traffic to you, it is plainly valuable, and search engines are likely to see it that way too.
You may also use…
2. PA
3. DA I believe it’s quite excellent. These indicators are quite excellent and fairly well-correlated
with value, at least when you can’t get to a statistic like genuine traffic since it’s coming from someone else’s site.
4. Linking root domains, which is the number of those to a page or domain.
5. The rankings go up. If a site is in position four and you see a new link come to it, that’s the only thing that has changed in the past few days or weeks, and you observe a rankings climb. It goes up a couple places. That’s an excellent way to say, “Okay, that’s a useful link.”” But this is a rare example when you can actually control other factors to the point that you can trust that.
6. I also prefer Spam Score for this since it helps you figure out whether the links are sketchy or if you can trust them better.
Last one,
So I believe that a lot of SEOs do this. There are a lot of links in our list. We have 50 links that we’re thinking about, “Should I get these or not? If so, which ones should I go after first and which ones should I not go after?” In this scenario…
1. DA/PA Checker is a really useful statistic since it can tell you how well the pages in a domain will do on Google, which is a nice way to see how it may assist your site rank better.
People do say things like, “Hey, it tends to be the case that when I go out and build a lot of DA 70, DA 80, and DA 90+ links, I often get credit.” Rand, why DA and not PA? In the case of receiving links, they typically come from new pages on a website that haven’t yet been given PA or may not have gotten all the link equity from all the internal pages.
As such pages receive more links over time, their PA will also go up. But the major reason I usually suggest a DA for link outreach is because of the PA/DA scheduling problem and because you don’t always know which page on a site would offer you a link. They may not have made it yet, thus it might be a new page. It might be one that you didn’t think they would add you to. It might be the page you wanted, but it’s impossible to determine for sure.
2. I believe connecting root domains is a really good idea for this. connecting root domains is definitely strongly tied to DA and ranks, although not nearly as tightly related.
3. The Spam Score, as we’ve spoken about.
4. If I’m really interested in genuine traffic sent, I may utilize something like SimilarWeb’s traffic estimations. If I’m looking for no-followed links, affiliate connections, or simply traffic more than the ability to raise my rank, SimilarWeb offers what I believe is the greatest traffic projection engine, so that’s the measure I would use.
So, I hope you now know more about DA, PA, and link counts, as well as when and when to use them with other metrics. I’m looking forward to your questions. I’ll be pleased to hop into the comments and respond.