Page authority questions?
-
I've been analyzing some IT communities ...in order to check how relevant is the page authority vs PageRank. I found one main site which is organized by "communities'..and every community is a sub-domain. The root domain has an authority of 90/100 which it should be great......so the sub-domains "inherit" part of this authority.... Until here everything seems to be perfect. However, I went deeper and I picked one of these communities. Analyzing the "Linking Root Domain" I discovered it only has only 5 root domains pointing to its home page. Those 5 Root Domains have generated more than 134k links. That doesn't seem to be "natural".
Checking those 5 Root Domains I discovered that they have been registered by the same Root Domain site.
Ex:
Main domain: Domain.com
Linking Root Domains: DomainXY.com
It seems to me that it is easy to cheat the authority domain score. Just creating others sites developing the same topic and generating back links to your main domain
-
So, keep in mind that "cheating" Page Authority isn't really very useful - we're just creating a predictive metric. We have no control over whether you actually rank. PA is a machine-learning model designed to predict the ranking ability of a page, but it's far from complete or perfect (no one number can be, although we're trying to improve it all the time).
Sub-domains are tricky animals. Sometimes, they inherit a lot of power from the root domain. Sometimes, they get fragmented and essentially act like entirely separate domains. Our PA model doesn't really account for all of that complexity. It's a best guess, ultimately. There are certainly cases, though, where a sub-domain ranks well without many unique links, solely based on the power of the root domain. That's far from guaranteed, though.
-
What is the site that you analyzed? Comparing PA versus PR isn't going to help you btw. Page rank can be manipulated as well very easily. For example I seen a pr4 for sale on godaddy auctions today for $5.00. The site had 0 backlinks. The site has been down for 1 year. So how does it still have a pr4? Pr4 to me isn't a good indication to link to anymore at all. People buy high pr sites daily and can make them look like they are 10 years old fast. I count on PA and DA to give me a good indication, because most people aren't cheating DA and PA if there is truly a way to do it. Also, to cheat it, you would just be cheating for your own confidence and it wouldn't do anything to help you rank better if you cheated yourself to a high one.
So to sum it up, I feel that PA or DA is much more accurate and up to date than PR. Sure PR still has some weight if your going to buy a site, i think it's burnt into our brains that we need a good one, but it's not everything.
Have a great night.
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
-
Web Stie STUCK on page 2 for 2years
Our website is a dating site for adults (not porn) (http://www.swingersocial.com) It’s been STUCK in the middle of page 2 for 1 ½ years. Moving up or down 2 ranking, that’s it. The way we determine our location is by entering the most common phrases used by people who search for our type of site. We surveyed 50+ people and the phrases they most frequently entered when using Google were “swingers websites” “swingers sites” and “free swingers sites”. In addition to our competitors ranking above us, they show “movement” in their rankings up & or down. Some even dropped to page 2 but they recovered – we are not seeing the same movement or recovery. Pages crawled on have remained virtually unchanged for months. The last 1 ½ years we have hired SEO companies, and as a result a great deal of effort has been put into the site. We are not naïve and realize some were better than others. We’ve invested a great deal of effort into content, key words, modifying tags, and throughout all of this we’ve seen no change. We had a detailed audit suggesting improvements (no surprise), the report overall was positive stating “There are a few things to do to optimize the site but looking at the keywords, SwingerSocial.com should be able to rank high.” We also implemented a blog area with over 70 blog posts. Our competitors on the other hand have only two blog posts and are continually ranking higher than us. Additionally, our competitors do not have sites on Pinterest, G+, FB, or Twitter – we have a presence on some of these. I do know that the number and quality of links are terrible. I’m looking for a partner to help us make strategic changes to the site that will allow us to rank higher.
Moz Pro | | sailor35700 -
Duplicate Page
I just Check Crawl the status error with Duplicate Page Content. As Mentioned Below. Songs.pk | Download free mp3, Hindi Music, Indian Mp3 Songs http://www.getmp3songspk.com Songs.pk | Download free mp3, Hindi Music, Indian Mp3 Songs http://getmp3songspk.com and then i added these lines to my htaccess file RewriteBase /
Moz Pro | | Getmp3songspk
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.getmp3songspk.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.getmp3songspk.com/$1 [L,R=301] But Still See that error again when i crawl a new test.0 -
How to know exactly which page links to a 404 page on my website?
Hi Moz users, Sometimes I get 404 crawl errors using Moz Pro and when my website has a few dozen pages it is hard for me to find the original page that links to a 404 page. Is there a way to find this automatically using Moz or do I have to look for it manually? I just need to find the original link and delete it to fix my 404 issue. Please let me know thank you for you help. -Marc
Moz Pro | | marcandre0 -
Why SEOmoz bot consider these as duplicate pages?
Hello here, SEOmoz bot has recently marked the following two pages as duplicate: http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/score/PatrickCollectionFlPf.html?tab=mp3 http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/score/PatrickCollectionFlPf.html?tab=pdf I don't personally see how these pages can be considered duplicate since their content is quite different. Thoughts??!!
Moz Pro | | fablau0 -
Duplicate Page Titles and Content
The SeoMoz crawler has found many pages like this on my site with /?Letter=Letter, e.g. http://www.johnsearles.com/metal-art-tiles/?D=A. I believe it is finding multiple caches of a page and identifying them as duplicates. Is there any way to screen out these multiple cache results?
Moz Pro | | johnsearles0 -
On Page Analysis and Grading
I received an email that my on page analysis for my campaigns were completed. But when I click on the link there are no grades there. What does that mean? Another question on this topic....when your campaign is graded are pages graded on all the keywords in the campaign or is each keyword graded invidividually? Thanks!
Moz Pro | | Confections0 -
"Duplicate Page Title" and "Duplicate Page Content" issue
Hi I am having an issue with my site showing duplicate page title and content issues for www.domain.com and www.domain.com/ Is the trailing slash really an issue? Can someone help me with a mod_rewrite rule to sort this please? Thanks,
Moz Pro | | JoeBrewer
Joe0 -
Where can I view all of the Questions that I have Answered?
AFAICT there's no way to filter questions to the ones that you have answered. Is there any plan to implement a filter like this? I realise there are email notifications available but no easy way to just go back and check on your answers. No doubt I'm just missing something here so if I'm completely wrong, please point me in the right direction 🙂 Thanks very much!
Moz Pro | | NickPateman811