Page Authority vs Domain Authority: Which One Should You Actually Be Tracking

Most SEOs I meet track Domain Authority religiously and barely glance at Page Authority. That's understandable — DA is cleaner to report, easier to explain to clients, and feels more strategic. But there are specific situations where DA will mislead you and PA will tell you exactly what you need to know. After years of using both together, here's how I actually think about the difference and when each one earns the attention.

The Core Difference

Domain Authority measures the predicted ranking strength of an entire domain. Page Authority measures the predicted ranking strength of a single URL. That's the whole distinction, and everything else follows from it. DA is a domain-level metric. PA is a page-level metric. Google ranks individual pages, not domains, so for the purpose of understanding why a specific URL ranks where it does, PA is the more directly relevant signal.

Both are built on the same underlying Moz infrastructure — trained on similar data, using similar machine learning methods, expressed on a logarithmic 1 to 100 scale. A site's DA is not simply the average of all its pages' PA scores. DA is calculated separately using domain-wide link data. PA reflects the links pointing specifically to that URL, plus the domain authority that flows through internal links from the rest of the site.

When DA Is the Right Metric

DA is the right metric when you're making domain-level decisions. Evaluating whether a site is worth building a relationship with for link acquisition. Comparing your overall authority against competitors to understand where you stand. Benchmarking progress on a link building campaign over time. Qualifying domains as link prospects during outreach. These are all domain-level questions, and DA answers them cleanly.

When I'm doing a competitive landscape audit — running a batch of competitor sites through the bulk DA checker — DA is what I care about. I'm not asking "how strong is this specific page?" I'm asking "how authoritative is this website overall?" DA answers that question efficiently.

When PA Is the Right Metric

PA earns its keep when you're analyzing specific ranking competitions. If you want to understand why a particular URL ranks in position two for a high-value keyword, PA gives you a more accurate picture than DA. The ranking page's PA reflects how much link equity has accumulated at that specific URL — from external backlinks pointing directly to it, and from internal links pushing authority from the rest of the domain.

PA is also the right metric for internal link strategy. Once you know which pages on your own site have the highest PA — typically because external links point to them — those are the pages from which internal links carry the most weight. Building a thoughtful internal linking structure that routes authority from your high-PA pages toward the pages you want to rank is one of the most underused tactics in SEO, and you can't do it effectively without page-level data.

The Relationship Between DA and PA on the Same Site

On most real websites, DA and PA are not synchronized. A site might have DA 45 but have a specific blog post with PA 38 and a homepage with PA 55. The homepage typically holds the highest PA on any site because it accumulates the most external links and benefits from every internal link on the domain. Deep pages — blog posts, product pages, category pages — often have much lower PA than the domain's overall DA would imply.

This gap between DA and page-level PA is one of the reasons a site with DA 50 can lose specific ranking battles to a site with DA 35. If the lower-DA site has built targeted links directly to the ranking page, that page's PA can exceed what the higher-DA site's equivalent page holds. Domain-level authority matters, but it doesn't override page-level link concentration on specific queries.

Using PA for Link Building Decisions

When evaluating where to place a guest post on a site, PA matters more than DA for that specific decision. A link from a DA 50 site's deeply buried page with PA 18 is worth less than a link from a DA 38 site's regularly updated resource page with PA 42. The link passes authority from the specific page it lives on, not from the domain's overall DA.

I typically check PA on the specific pages I'm targeting for guest posts. A quick check of the prospective page alongside the domain's DR score gives me a complete picture: domain authority, referring domain quality, and page-level authority for the specific URL I'd be getting a link from.

How They're Both Calculated

Both DA and PA start with Moz's link index — a crawl of billions of pages and the links between them. From that data, Moz extracts link signals: how many unique domains link to this page or domain, how authoritative those linking pages and domains are, how links flow through internal linking structures. These signals feed machine learning models trained to predict Google ranking positions.

The logarithmic scale means the same point improvement requires more work at higher numbers. Going from PA 20 to PA 30 is achievable with a targeted link building effort. Going from PA 60 to PA 70 requires significantly more referring domain growth from high-authority sources. The same dynamic applies to DA.

Practical Workflow

My actual workflow: I check DA first for any domain-level evaluation — link prospecting, competitive benchmarking, client reporting. I switch to PA when analyzing a specific ranking position, planning internal link architecture, or evaluating which page on a site to target for guest post placement. For most day-to-day link building work, DA is the primary screen. PA comes in for deeper analysis on pages that matter.

Common Questions About PA vs DA

Which metric correlates more strongly with Google rankings? For predicting whether a specific URL ranks well for a specific keyword, PA typically shows stronger correlation than DA. DA is useful for predicting a site's general ranking capability, but Google's actual ranking decision is page-level, and PA is closer to that reality.

Can a page have higher PA than the site's DA? Yes, on pages that have accumulated exceptional external links — often the homepage, or content that went viral and earned hundreds of direct backlinks. The homepage of most sites has higher PA than the domain's DA because it's the most externally linked-to URL on the domain.

How do I increase PA on a specific page? Two methods: build external links directly to that URL, and route internal links to it from your highest-PA pages. External links matter more, but internal links from authoritative pages on your own domain are something you fully control and often underutilized. Check your page-level PA data to identify which internal pages you should be linking from.

Should I report DA or PA to clients? DA for regular reporting — it's easier to understand and tells the story of overall authority growth. Use PA when explaining why a specific page ranks or doesn't rank, or when making the case for targeted link building to a specific URL. Both numbers are useful; they just answer different questions for different audiences.