How much domain authority is passed on through a link from a page with low authority?
-
Hello,
Let's say that there is a link to site A from site B. The domain authority of site B is 85, but the link is on a page that has a page authority of only 1. Does much authority get passed along from site B to site A? (Let's assume site A has a domain authority of 35, if that's relevant.)
Thank you!
-
Thanks, Federico.
-
Thank you, Keri!
-
Thank you very much, Dr. Meyers! This was extremely helpful.
-
Unfortunately, Dr. Matt's out of town, so this answer won't be as thorough as I'd like, but the gist of it is that we factor in both DA and PA to some degree. If a site has very high DA but a very low PA (as in your example), we're going to bias somewhat toward the DA, as we believe Google sometimes does (a virtually unknown page on Wikipedia can rank very well, for example). Likewise, a high-PA page on a site with low DA may pass more through the PA, because (hopefully) that page has some legitimate authority.
It's a bit more complex, because DA and PA are related as well, so they do influence each other to some degree. On larger sites, the influence of any single page's PA is small, but the influence can be more obvious on smaller sites.
Putting aside our math, I think a link from a low-authority page on a high-authority site can be worthwhile. Look at directories, like DMOZ. I think it's important to make sure the low-PA page is indexed (some DMOZ pages aren't, because they're buried so deeply in the link structure), and I wouldn't get hung up on a link from a high-DA site. It's ultimately just one link. I wouldn't dismiss it as useless either, though. There's some amount of site/page balance in the mix and Google doesn't rely on only one type of authority.
-
I'm checking with Dr. Matt Peters, head of our Data Science team. It's less about secrecy and more that DA/PA are based on machine learning and have gotten a bit complex. Still, I suspect we can give you a general sense of how DA/PA pass through links. Posting this because I suspect an answer may take a day or two.
-
Well, it is a bit late for regular office hours for most Moz staff, so you may not hear an answer until tomorrow. The answer may also include "remember, what the search engines think is what matters", but you should get an answer with at least some information in the next couple of days.
-
and I am sure Moz will not answer this at all!
-
It is, but no one outside Moz can answer that, there are several metrics that affect authority passing, and I guess that most of those metrics and algos are property of Moz and most likely secret to prevent abuse.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Redirect multiple domains to 1 domain or not?
Hi there, I have client who has multiple domains that already have some PA and DA. Problem is that most websites have the same content and rank better on different keywords.
Technical SEO | | Leaf-a-mark
I want to redirect all the websites to 1 domain because it’s easier to manage and it removes any duplicate content. Question is if I redirect domain x to domain y do the rankings of domain x increase on domain y? Or is it better to keep domain x separately to generate more referral traffic to domain y? Thanks in advance! Cheers0 -
Why is the Page Authority for posts in my blog so low
I have noticed that the Page Authority for my posts in my blog are all hovering around 1 and the rest of the pages on my website are around 20. The Domain Authority for my website is 16 and I think the page authority of my posts are negatively affecting my Domain Authority as I write more content. Any suggestions or recommendations as to why posts have such low Page Authority compared to similar pages. I have images, links, and great content in my posts, but they are considerably lower in Page Authority*
Technical SEO | | JoeyGedgaud0 -
How long after disallowing Googlebot from crawling a domain until those pages drop out of their index?
We recently had Google crawl a version of the site we that we had thought we had disallowed already. We have corrected the issue of them crawling the site, but pages from that version are still appearing in the search results (the version we want them to not index and serve up is our .us domain which should have been blocked to them). My question is this: How long should I expect that domain (the .us we don't want to appear) to stay in their index after disallowing their bot? Is this a matter of days, weeks, or months?
Technical SEO | | TLM0 -
GWT shows 38 external links from 8 domains to this PDF - But it shows no links and no authority in OSE
Hi All, I found one other discussion about the subject of PDFs and passing of PageRank here: http://moz.com/community/q/will-a-pdf-pass-pagerank But this thread didn't answer my question so am posting it here. This PDF: http://www.ccisolutions.com/jsp/pdf/YAM-EMX_SERIES.PDF is reported by GWT to have 38 links coming from 8 unique domains. I checked the domains and some of them are high-quality relevant sites. Here's the list: Domains and Number of Links
Technical SEO | | danatanseo
prodiscjockeyequipment.com 9
decaturilmetalbuildings.com 9
timberlinesteelbuildings.com 6
jaymixer.com 4
panelsteelbuilding.com 4
steelbuildingsguide.net 3
freedocumentsearch.com 2
freedocument.net 1 However, when I plug the URL for this PDF into OSE, it reports no links and a Page Authority if only "1". This is not a new page. This is a really old page. In addition to that, when I check the PageRank of this URL, the PageRank is "nil" - not even "0" - I'm currently working on adding links back to our main site from within our PDFs, but I'm not sure how worthwhile this is if the PDFs aren't being allocated any authority from the pages already linking to them. Thoughts? Comments? Suggestions? Thanks all!0 -
Blocking Test Pages Enmasse on Sub-domain
Hello, We have thousands of test pages on a sub-domain of our site. Unfortunately at some point, these pages were visible to search engines and got indexed. Subsequently, we made a change to the robots.txt file for the test sub-domain. Gradually, over a period of a few weeks, the impressions and clicks as reported by Google Webmaster Tools fell off for the test. sub-domain. We are not able to implement the no index tag in the head section of the pages given the limitations of our CMS. Would blocking off Google bot via the firewall enmasse for all the test pages have any negative consequences for the main domain that houses the real live content for our sites (which we would like to of course remain in the Google index). Many thanks
Technical SEO | | CeeC-Blogger0 -
Home page indexed but not ranking...interior pages with thin content outrank home page??
I have a Joomla site with a home page that I can't get to rank for anything beyond the company name @ Google - the site works fine @ Bing and Yahoo. The interior pages will rank all day long but the home page never shows up in the results. I have checked the page code out in every tool that I know about and have had no luck....by all account it should be good to go...any thoughts/comments/help would be greatly appreciated. The site is http://www.selectivedesigns.com Thanks! Greg
Technical SEO | | DougHosmer0 -
Diagnostic says too many links on a page and most of the pages are from blog entries. Are tags considered links? How do I decrease links?
I just ran my first diagnostic on my site and the results came back were negative in the area of too many links one a page. There were also quite a few 404 errors. What is the best way to fix these problems? Most of the pages with too many links are from blog posts, are the tags counted as well and is this the reason for too many links?
Technical SEO | | Newport10300 -
Backlinks to home page vs internal page
Hello, What is the point of getting a large amount of backlinks to internal pages of an ecommerce site? Although it would be great to make your articles (for example) strong, isn't it more important to build up the strength of the home page. All of My SEO has had a long term goal of strengthening the home page, with just enough backlinks to internal pages to have balance, which is happening naturally. The home page of our main site is what comes up on tons of our keyword searches since it is so strong. Please let me know why so much effort is put into getting backlinks to internal pages. Thank you,
Technical SEO | | BobGW0