What is Page Authority and Why is it Important?

by | July 04, 2023

When you’re looking to improve your SEO, it might seem like there are so many metrics to manage and work with. It seems like a lot to have to deal with one more. But every metric is just a way of gaining insight into how your web pages and websites are doing and how your SEO efforts are shaping up in reality. 

One of those metrics you might be looking at is page authority. What is page authority? Does it matter? How can you boost it? That’s what we’re going to look at today, so you have a solid foundation of all the SEO terms you need to create a great high-ranking page. 

What Is Page Authority? 

Page authority is a score developed by Moz that shows you how a specific web page may perform or rank on a search engine page (SERP). Moz uses machine learning to identify the algorithm that best correlates with rankings across thousands of SERPs to give you an idea of if your page might rank. 

The key here is that page authority is a score from Moz, not from Google—so the score itself doesn’t determine if the page ranks or not. Instead, it’s helpful to think of the score as a reflection of how your SEO is doing on that page; your page authority is a predictive score about how your page may perform. 

Page authority is scored 1–100, with 100 being the highest possible score. Moz emphasizes that the score isn’t necessarily useful on its own but most powerful when used in comparison. So you can see how your page authority score compares to other pages on the SERP to determine how you might be able to rank. 

How Is Page Authority Calculated? 

Page authority is calculated on a logarithmic scale from 1–100. That means the jumps between scores get larger and harder to overcome, the higher the score gets. So boosting a score of 20 to 30 is much, much easier than boosting a score of 80 to 90. A score of 90 is basically an A+ in SEO and signifies that your page is probably going to rank and going to rank well. A low PA score sends the signal that your SEO on the page probably needs work. 

When calculating the score, Moz takes into account over 40 different metrics. Some of those factors are the number of quality backlinks you have, the quality of your content, keyword density, the amount of traffic the page gets, and even user behavior. All of these factors are things Google takes into account with rankings, which is why Moz uses them to predict the health of your SEO. You can find your page authority score for each page by using the free Moz toolbar. 

Domain Authority vs. Page Authority

Page authority sounds an awful lot like domain authority, but the two are different and can tell you different things. Domain authority is a score Moz gives you that reflects how your entire site is predicted to perform SEO-wise while page authority is specific to individual pages. That means you have a whole bunch of page authority scores but only one domain authority score. Having great page authority scores can help you boost your overall domain authority as well. 

Essentially your domain authority gives you insight into the overall SEO health of your website while page authority helps you see how SEO is going for individual pages. Using both of these scores can help give you a complete picture of your SEO efforts and how they’re paying off. 

Why Is Page Authority Important for SEO? 

It’s important to note that page authority doesn’t directly impact how your page will rank. PA doesn’t come from Google, and it isn’t a direct cause for your page to rank, and improving it doesn’t have a direct or instant boost on your SERP rankings. But that doesn’t mean page authority is something you want to ignore. 

Your page authority score gives you insight into how your SEO is going for your pages. You can see which individual pages have low scores, and that lets you know the SEO efforts are off there—and that gives you insights into how to improve your overall site rankings. Essentially you can use your page authority scores to know which pages are your weak points that aren’t ranking well and could be hurting you overall. 

So while you can’t directly change your rankings with your page authority, you can use PA to know where to get started and how to boost your rankings eventually. 

Things that Can Hurt Your Page Authority

Let’s take a look at factors that can be affecting your page authority scores, so you can know where to get started boosting your scores—which then helps you work toward improving your overall rankings and SEO. 

To start, here are two factors that can damage your page authority scores: 

Unreliable links

Backlinks are one of the foundational pieces of a great SEO strategy. But bad links can be even worse than no links. Unreliable links can decrease your page’s ranking, and that makes it hard to find your content. It gets worse, though. If your links are bad enough, you can be removed from the search altogether. So having unreliable and bad links on your page’s backlink profile is something that’s reflected in your page authority score. 

Low-quality content

Content is king, right? That’s honestly pretty true. Having low-quality content is also going to drop your page authority. It’s also going to hurt your site. That’s because the ranking boss Google wants pages to provide users with good content; it’s the point of search engines, after all. So if your page has bad content, your page authority score is going to drop—and your rankings likely will too. 

How to Increase Page Authority

While increasing your page authority isn’t going to directly impact your rankings, it’s a good idea still to boost your score. After all, it’s a predictive score that’ll help you get a handle on your rankings and SEO work. And it’s likely that if you have a higher PA, you’ll rank higher. So instead of working toward some hard-to-quantify rankings, you can work toward increasing your page authority. It’ll likely have similar results. 

So without further ado, here are 6 ways to boost your page authority score: 

Relatable content

One great way to improve your page authority score (and your rankings) is to create great content. Creating SEO-optimized content is how you’re going to signal to search engines that you have the answers and info for its users. Your goal here is to create content that people want to read. It needs to be informative, useful, and preferably well-written.  

High-quality content also includes lots of natural links. Both internal and external links can help you show your page is chock full of great info for internet users. You also want your content to be keyword oriented. Use keyword research to find the keywords that will help you improve your page authority. 

High-quality links

Bad links hurt your page authority, and high-quality links benefit it. It’s pretty simple. You will want both internal and external links. For internal links, your goal is to link to your site’s best pages. Link to your high-priority pages, your money-making pages. 

For external links, you want them from reputable sources—and you want to get them from white-hat link building. A link exchange might not be the best strategy to get those reputable sources. Instead, you want to get links from companies with a similar focus or mission. Those will be the ones that can help your page authority and help your pages perform. 

Check out your competition

Moz designed page authority scores specifically to be a comparative metric. You can and should compare your page authority scores to your competitors. With the Moz bar, you can easily figure out the PA of any page ranking in the SERP you want to rank in. That’s free information you can use to improve your own scores. Check out what these pages are doing, and use that information to improve your own. 

Update your content

Google tends to rank newer content higher than old content. That means your page authority also prioritizes newer content. Maybe your old content is really good, though—or maybe it has great info still. You can still use it! Just update it with an SEO content optimization, and now it’s a page with newer content, which can likely boost your PA. 

Update your content

Google tends to rank newer content higher than old content. That means your page authority also prioritizes newer content. Maybe your old content is really good, though—or maybe it has great info still. You can still use it! Just update it with an SEO content optimization, and now it’s a page with newer content, which can likely boost your PA. 

Create a sitemap

A sitemap is a file that tells Google’s bots how to crawl your pages. You give your pages hierarchy and let Google know which ones should be crawled first. Creating a sitemap improves the user experience (especially the bot user experience, which shouldn’t be ignored), helping you boost how a page might perform. 

Share your content on other channels

Here’s a backlink hack: a link from a social media share is still a backlink. That means sharing your content on tons of channels is a way to boost your page authority. Each of your blog posts (and other similar content) should be shared on your different platforms—each share can get you a backlink and help your PA. 

Conclusion

Page authority is a powerful metric to help you see how your pages might rank. It allows you to identify where you can improve and optimize certain pages by using links, creating more content, and more. It’s a pretty helpful number to give you insight into what pages are underperforming and what you can do to improve that. 

Two key factors that affect your page authority are your content and your links. BASE is uniquely positioned to help you improve your page authority. BASE sells high-quality links & content. Be sure to reach out to see how optimizing your content and adding backlinks to your site can improve your page authority!

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