What is page authority?
Page Authority is a metric developed by Moz (an SEO company) that predicts how specific pages rank on search engine result pages (SERPs). The score you receive is on a scale of 1-100, with the higher numbers reflecting a better ability to rank consistently.
When using Moz’s Page Authority information, the results come from numerous ranking factors and information taken from the company’s web index. As with the Domain Authority metric, Moz uses a machine learning model that identifies the best algorithm to correlate with the rankings across thousands of results pages.
That information gets predicted against future results, producing the Page Authority score that you see for your domain’s pages.
How to check your Page Authority
The easiest way to check your Page Authority score is to reach the Moz Link Explorer page. You’ll then follow these steps to access the information you need.
Enter the root domain URL you want to examine (your home page).
Create an account (or log in to an existing one) to access the free SEO tools offered by the organization.
Once you’ve entered your details, Moz will send a notification that requires email verification to continue.
After completing the verification work, the Page Authority information you want becomes accessible.
Here’s a quick look at mine on the 1st of March 2022.
Lower down this information page you will find individual page rankings, alongside lots of other useful information. Again here’s my snapshot for you.
You can see my home page’s Page Authority outranks my Domain Authority by far. This will often happen, as it is likely your home page is the most linked-to piece of content on your site.
How Page Authority contributes to Domain Authority
The Page Authority metric is like the Domain Authority information Moz produces. It doesn’t have a direct influence, but there are several optimization points to a target that can help to increase a score.
When looking at individual pages, you can tell what information on your website is weaker than others. By examining each subdomain URL, the domain analysis lets you see the lowest scores that require improvement.
If you work on increasing the scores of pages that perform poorly, there is an excellent chance that you’ll begin creating a higher Domain Authority score quickly. The individual contribution of each page to the Web Page Ranking System is significant.
The one difference that you’ll see with Page Authority is that it won’t take on-page SEO elements into account for the score. Instead of focusing on keyword usage, you’d want to examine the quality and quantity of your backlinks to increase the score of each page.
You can check your current Page Authority score by using Link Explorer, Keyword Explorer, or MozBar. It’s also part of the Pro campaigns infrastructure if you invest in that direction or Moz’s API. Although you do have limited access with the free plan.
What is a good Page Authority score?
The Page Authority score is more of a holistic metric than something tangible, like site traffic or a conversion rate. If you want to improve it, the best way to start is to create a better link profile by increasing the quality of your backlinks.
Since it is a relative measure, there isn’t a specific Page Authority score to consider that makes your site “good” and others “bad.” The goal should be to have a better number than what the competition achieves. That way, you can get to the top and stay there, by establishing your authority for current and future Internet users.
Why you should check your Page Authority regularly
Domain Authority can fluctuate widely depending on the individual page performance of your website. Let’s say you update, or even delete older product pages. The individual rankings of these pages in SERPs contribute to a change in your Page Authority score. As your Domain Authority is an average of your pages combined, minor fluctuations and changes in scores on individual pages can sometimes have a bigger impact on the overall result.
This means if you are trying to rank higher in SERP for a specific keyword, or topic, Page Authority scores in comparison to the competition for that topic or keyword is something you must pay attention to.
Let’s look at an example.
Say I want to increase my rankings in SERP for an article I wrote on Hootsuite, highlighted above.
I press the magnifying glass icon by the URL line in question and it takes me to this page.
Here I can see full details of those linking domains. Press the number of the linking domains in the header above and you will find a list of linking authorities, plus their spam score.
The spam score is an important factor here when choosing sites to gain backlinks from because the higher the percentage spam score, the worse that looks for those linked on these sites.
Top tip here - you may find and probably will find a good deal of entirely non-related websites linking to your content. To better this try gaining backlinks from related industry peers, on blog posts where your information offers a related and additional value to their reader. This will help you gain more backlinks with authority that Google will recognise and reward. At the same time make sure that you analyse their website for spam scores and Domain and Page Authority, so that when you ask for a backlink to your website, you know it is going to produce what Google and other search engines would class as a good reputational citation.
Can you disavow bad backlinks?
I’ve not personally done this and understand it to be complicated, but yes it is possible. There is lots of speculation whether this makes any difference, in that search engines may not class those backlinks from high spam scoring websites as useful in your ranking anyway, therefore ignoring them.
My best advice would be to concentrate on building plenty of good backlinks to your content instead. This is also the easier route for smaller businesses and solopreneurs trying to gain better rankings for the content they produce and enjoy a better slice of web traffic on their given topic.
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