I am a member of many blogger forums, Facebook groups and regularly take part in Twitter chats and recently there seems to be one big question cropping up time and time again; ‘What is my PA and DA?’. As Google PageRank becomes slightly more unreliable when it comes to stats, PR’s and brands are turning to PA (Page Authority) and DA (Domain Authority) when selecting bloggers for reviews and sponsored posts. This seems to have thrown a cloud of confusion over us bloggers, so I thought I’d do my bit to try and clear it up.
Firstly, DA and PA are two primary metric systems used to work out your blogs stats, which are provided and calulated by SEOmoz.org.
DA – Domain Authority
Domain Authority is calculated on how well a domain is likely to rank in Google search results. It uses a very complicated technical algorithm to basically formulate an educated guess as to how your site will rank against the other thousands of search results. Domain Authority is mainly calculated on how many inbound quality links you have, coming from other websites or blogs. Having quality links is a sign to Google that you have good quality content which is worth sharing. Tactics such as blog commenting, directory submission and social media all help to build you a nice collection of inbound links to your blog, which will all help to boost domain authority and traffic over time. I have noticed recently that PR’s and media agencies tend to be focusing on DA a lot and are usually looking for blogs around DA 25+ as a starting point, but this really does depend on the campaign.
PA – Page Authority Page Authority predicts how well your page is likely to rank in search results, regardless of it’s content. The higher the page authority, the greater the potential for the page to rank well, and show closer to the top of the results when a search is performed. This just as important, as search engines such as Google will index pages rather than full websites. To rank well you need a good Domain Authority overall as a starting point. If you write a page that attracts a lot of links from relevant, quality sources this will increase your page authority.
So, to summarise – DA measures the predictive ranking strength of the entire domain, so your blog as a whole, whereas page authority meansures the strength of one individual page within your blog (i.e – a review you’ve written on skincare products).
Use this handy tool to check your Domain Authority and Page Authority.
(Something important to note is that DA doesn’t work on .blogspot or .wordress addresses, so only use this if you own your own domain)
Hope this clarifies it a little – please do get in touch via the comment box below, or on Twitter if you get stuck (or just for a general chinwag too)
Are you enjoying my Blogger Tips series? If so, check out the rest of the posts in the series to find out how to increase your Google PageRank, Promote a Blog Post and to find your voice and identity on your blog.
