What Is DA / PA - Domain / Page Authority? How To Increase It?

When you start exploring SEO techniques you will come across a lot of new terms. One of them is about DA - PA. DA - PA stands for Domain Authority and Page Authority. What is DA / PA and why is it important?

If you came to this page via a search engine, this is obviously important to you. The proof, you surf the internet to find out about it, hohoho ...

Keep reading, if you are interested in diving deeper. I will share experiences regarding what DA / PA is and how to improve it.

Domain Authority

Domain Authority is assessed by evaluating several factors, including the backlinks linking to the root domain and the total number of links. Thus forming a single DA score. This score is usually used to compare between websites or track the "ranking strength" of a site for SEO purposes.

Please note, Domain Authority is not a metric used by Google in determining search rankings. So it is not a final value that has an effect on SERPs.

Page Authority

Page Authority is based on data from the Moz index and takes many factors into account. Like the influence of Domain Authority, it uses a machine learning model to identify the algorithms that are most thought to be correlated with rankings in the thousands of SERPs.

Although there is no “domain authority” in itself, the individual factors that make these metrics occur are the parts that are believed to have an effect on a site's ranking.

The success factors in SEO Off Page are very important to know, but they can be difficult to fully understand. Because, Google itself uses some special metrics. And sadly, this was not disclosed.

There has been a lot of speculation regarding some of Google's metrics, and there may be some disagreements. So, Google doesn't count "domain authority" directly, they tend to calculate authority on a page-by-page basis. Because, even popular sites have low quality pages.

Even so, there are some important signals from a site that is often considered a determinant of domain authority. That is separate from page authority.

Domain Authority Factor

This Moz version of the term domain authority works based on an algorithm to predict from various factors. It is completely independent from Google. While this is not an official Google metric, understanding the individual factors that determine authority can help your rankings.

Domain authority refers to your website as a whole, and is a measure of how widely your site is known in its topic or field.

Google has rejected the idea that sites have some authority, even though the size of authority such as backlinks and visitors that we know directly affects searches. This shows that “domain authority” is not an official metric, but simply a measure of some other important measure.

How Is Domain Authority Measured?

There are a number of site-wide factors that influence domain authority. The first is backlinks.

There are a number of backlink metrics (number of links, number of referring domains, link quality, link relevance), but they will be simplified into one category here. Having a large number of relevant backlinks is the most important backlink metric for your domain authority. Because every link counts as a vote to become an authority within your niche focus area.

Having lots of high quality backlinks from sites that are not related to your own site helps your site to be seen as the most trustworthy, but gaining authority status is done through getting links from other sites in the same niche.

Example Of Site Authority

For example, ESPN is the authority on the internet for sports. Almost every good sports website in the world will be linked to ESPN at some point, being considered a relevant and quality voice in sports topics.

When people search for sports-related topics, the search engines know that pages on ESPN will be relevant, and give their pages a boost (especially if the search intent is unclear).

For ESPN, having lots of backlinks from high quality sites is important for their ranking, but relevant links are what help them build authority on their topic.

Relevant links indicate who has authority on a topic, and the following factors play a role in confirming whether the entire site is trustworthy and authoritative:

• User experience: Official websites tend to have a lot of visitors, and keep visitors on the site for a long time. A positive user experience measure, helps determine whether individuals find the same site to be an authority.
• Have a complete website: You need to have a complete website that features a sitemap, lots of quality content, and an effective structure. It also relates to a positive user experience and a signal of trust. 
• Regular updates: Sites that are regularly updated is another common trust factor that all authoritative sites have. Posting content will show that the site is up to date and active.
• Domain age: The domain age of a site is only a simple factor, but search engines will consider sites that have been around for a long time. Because spam websites may not last long.

Page Authority Factor

Google in the past said that, each page has its own authority, and most authority measures are carried out on a page by page basis.

An individual page is generally considered an authority, when it is frequently crawled because of the effective link structure that prioritizes a page.

Again, page authority checkers will use their own formula to guess how Google will perceive page authority. But don't really be a standard rule, because no one knows the exact factors used by Google or other search engines.

Over the years, page authority was determined by an algorithm known as PageRank, which appears to be almost exclusively judged by links.

This mostly looks at the internal link structure, determining which pages the website thinks are most important. However, Google currently uses artificial intelligence as one of the main factors in determining page authority.

How Is Page Authority Measured?

The artificial intelligence used by Google is known as RankBrain, and it is one of the most important factors in determining the authority of a page.

RankBrain also deals with page authority as it is mostly used to understand the intent of a search query, and relates complex searches to general page authority within a topic.

By definition, artificial intelligence is capable of teaching itself and attracting new connections in the same way as humans. This makes identifying authority metrics for pages more difficult, as they can change at any time and are very complex.

The Page Authority Specifier.

The biggest factor in determining page authority is links, as is the case with PageRank. This includes an effective internal link structure, as well as backlinks.

When your website is crawled, the most frequently linked pages will rank highly on your site. Creating links to pages not only allows them to be indexed more regularly, it also shows them on search engines as important pages on your site.

However, this does not constitute much of an authority on a particular subject or topic. In order for a page to be considered to be at an expert and authoritative level for a particular query or search topic, you need lots of relevant links to that page.

This is the equivalent of building site-wide authority on a topic, as long as all links point to a specific page.

Other metrics that can influence page authority are social media shares and user experience.

Sharing is a less reliable version of a backlink, where every share is a vote for quality content. The user experience includes people who stay on the site for a certain duration of time, having quite an impact on page authority.

Impact Of Authority On SEO

In many instances, domain authority can act as a last resort for search engines to link you with relevant material.

If the keywords used in the search don't return very relevant results, that's usually the case with very long searches. If there are not many pages about a particular search, sites that are considered authoritative in the topic area are likely to appear. Otherwise, the domain authority as a whole doesn't have a big impact.

However, Page Authority is very important for SEO. If a page has low authority, it is unlikely to rank high in searches, especially for competitive keywords.

This is partly due to low authority, but also because pages that are less linked will be indexed less frequently, which has a distinct impact on search rankings.

High-authority pages will get a boost for the main keyword and usually rank for more organic keywords.

This means that page authority can help you in a number of ways. The combination of all the factors that influence your authority is also the biggest indicator of the trustworthiness of your site.

What To Do?

Getting good domain authority and page authority isn't easy, but there are lots of things you can do to at least improve your situation.

Follow these tips to increase the overall authority of your website, and increase your ranking factors in this long SEO struggle:

1. Create A Sitemap

XML sitemaps are very useful for internal link structure, and can help get the most traffic and link juice to your most important pages.

2. Prioritize Pages

Make a plan about which pages should get the most authority on your site. Whichever page you want to rank the most should be linked throughout your website.

Including a link in the site footer is a great way to do this. Most sites have the home page as the most authoritative page, so linking the home page helps a little too.

While an effective link structure will help maximize the number of authority pages you can have, not every page can have high authority due to authority relative to other pages on the site. Ensure that important pages are prioritized as necessary.

3. Landingpage Optimization

This is similar to prioritizing pages, but the first is about letting bots find your important pages. Optimizing your landingpage involves creating a clear pathway for how users will navigate your website. This will help your conversion rates, and for SEO purposes it will help drive more traffic to your important pages, which should aid their authority.

Find out how people navigate your site by looking at data in Google analytics or seeing for yourself which pages you encounter most frequently while navigating your site.

4. Get Backlinks For Your Important Pages

This is a lot easier said than done, but there are lots of great ways to increase backlinks to your important pages. Make sure the page is user friendly, share it on social media and on forums, and make sure the content is high quality. If you actually have some sort of authority in your field, you should be able to make some pages recognizable that way.

Keep your content fresh. Google and Bing both love fresh content. Always update your important pages, and update your other website content.

While there are some questions about what constitutes domain authority and page authority, they still have a strong effect on search rankings.

Domain authority doesn't have a direct impact on rankings, but is a valuable metric, as it tracks various signals that directly impact search.

Page authority has its own direct influence, and acts as a leading indicator of trust.

Using page authority to improve your SEO ranking will be of great help, but it's far from the only factor in SEO success.

Find out what else you need to do to get your site on the first page of search engines. To help further optimize your site, ask for a competitive analysis to see how you stack up to your competitors and how you can be the best in the market.