What Is Page Authority and How Does It Affect Your Website's Rankings?

Page Authority (PA) is a metric developed by Moz that predicts how likely a single webpage is to rank in search engine results pages (SERPs). It's scored on a logarithmic scale from 1 to 100 — the higher the number, the stronger the page's perceived ranking potential.

Understanding what drives Page Authority, what it actually measures, and how it interacts with your broader SEO strategy is essential knowledge for anyone working in web development or digital marketing.

Where Page Authority Comes From

Moz built Page Authority as part of its suite of predictive SEO metrics. The score is calculated using data from Moz's own web index and incorporates dozens of signals, with link data being the most significant factor.

At its core, PA is heavily influenced by:

• The number of external links pointing to that specific page
• The quality and authority of those linking domains
• The diversity of linking root domains
• MozRank and MozTrust signals, which measure link equity and trustworthiness of the link graph

One important distinction: Page Authority measures the strength of a single URL, not the entire domain. That's what separates it from Domain Authority (DA), which evaluates the overall ranking potential of a whole website.

Page Authority vs. Domain Authority

These two metrics are often confused, but they measure different things:

A site can have a high Domain Authority while many of its individual pages carry low Page Authority scores — especially newer pages with few inbound links. Conversely, a single highly-linked page on an otherwise low-DA domain can carry a strong PA score.

Why the Scale Is Logarithmic

The 1–100 scale isn't linear, which matters practically. Moving a page from PA 20 to PA 30 is significantly easier than moving it from PA 70 to PA 80. 🔢

This reflects how link equity actually works on the web: authoritative, well-linked pages are rare, and each incremental gain at the high end requires exponentially more link-building effort. For most new pages, scores in the 1–20 range are normal and expected.

What Page Authority Is Not

Page Authority is a third-party metric — it is not a Google ranking signal. Google does not use Moz's PA score when determining where your page appears in search results. Google uses its own internal signals, including PageRank and hundreds of other algorithmic factors, none of which are directly exposed to the public.

PA is best understood as a proxy — a useful approximation based on observable link data that tends to correlate with ranking ability, not a direct measurement of it.

This means:

• A page with PA 50 doesn't guarantee a first-page ranking
• A page with PA 20 can outrank a PA 60 page if it's significantly more relevant to the query
• PA scores fluctuate as Moz updates its index, even if you haven't changed your page

Factors That Influence Page Authority 📈

Because PA is so link-centric, the variables that move the number are fairly well understood:

Increases PA:

• Earning backlinks from authoritative, relevant external sites
• Acquiring links from many distinct root domains
• Internal linking from other high-PA pages on your own site
• Pages that attract editorial links naturally over time

Can decrease or stagnate PA:

• Losing backlinks (link rot, site shutdowns, disavow activity)
• Competing pages in your niche building stronger link profiles faster
• Moz index recrawl cycles reassessing link quality

Technical factors like page speed, structured data, or content quality do not directly affect PA — though they influence actual Google rankings in ways PA doesn't capture.

How PA Varies Across Different Scenarios

The practical meaning of a Page Authority score shifts depending on your context:

Competitive commercial niches (finance, insurance, SaaS): Pages ranking on page one often have PA scores in the 40–70+ range, built through years of earned editorial links and content distribution.

Niche or long-tail topics: Highly specific queries may see pages with PA in the 15–35 range ranking effectively because the competition for those exact terms is lower.

Brand new pages: Even on strong domains, newly published pages typically start near PA 1 and build slowly as internal links and external backlinks accumulate.

Informational vs. commercial content: Blog posts and resource guides often accumulate more organic backlinks than product or service pages, creating PA disparities across the same domain.

How PA Is Used in Practice

SEO professionals most often use Page Authority as a competitive benchmarking tool rather than a target in itself. Common applications include:

• Competitor gap analysis — identifying which of a competitor's pages carry the most link equity
• Link prospecting — evaluating whether a potential linking page is worth pursuing
• Content auditing — spotting which internal pages have strong PA and could pass equity to weaker pages through strategic internal linking
• Prioritizing link-building efforts — focusing on pages where PA improvement would have the most ranking impact

What makes PA genuinely useful is its ability to give a quick, standardized signal when comparing pages across different sites. It's an imperfect shorthand, but a practical one. 🔍

The Relationship Between PA and Your Actual SEO Goals

Page Authority answers one narrow question: how strong is this page's link profile relative to other pages on the web? It doesn't account for content relevance, keyword targeting, user experience, or technical SEO — all of which affect real-world rankings.

For any specific page you're trying to rank, the weight PA carries depends entirely on how competitive the target keyword is, how well the page is already optimized for relevance signals, what your domain's baseline authority looks like, and how aggressively competing pages are being built out. Those variables don't resolve into a single universal answer — they resolve differently for every page and every site.