Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
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
-
How effective are 301 redirects in passing page rank?
I have a blog which is ranking well for certain terms, and would like to repurpose it to better explain these terms it is ranking for, including updating the url to the new term the blog will be about. The plan being to 301 redirect the old url to new. In the past, I've done this with other pages, and have actually lost much of the rankings that I had earned on the original URL. What is your take on this? Maybe repurpose blog, but maintain original URL just to be on the safe side? Thanks
Technical SEO | | CitimarineMoz0 -
Is it good to redirect million of pages on a single page?
My site has 10 lakh approx. genuine urls. But due to some unidentified bugs site has created irrelevant urls 10 million approx. Since we don’t know the origin of these non-relevant links, we want to redirect or remove all these urls. Please suggest is it good to redirect such a high number urls to home page or to throw 404 for these pages. Or any other suggestions to solve this issue.
Technical SEO | | vivekrathore0 -
Should I disavow links from pages that don't exist any more
Hi. Im doing a backlinks audit to two sites, one with 48k and the other with 2M backlinks. Both are very old sites and both have tons of backlinks from old pages and websites that don't exist any more, but these backlinks still exist in the Majestic Historic index. I cleaned up the obvious useless links and passed the rest through Screaming Frog to check if those old pages/sites even exist. There are tons of link sending pages that return a 0, 301, 302, 307, 404 etc errors. Should I consider all of these pages as being bad backlinks and add them to the disavow file? Just a clarification, Im not talking about l301-ing a backlink to a new target page. Im talking about the origin page generating an error at ping eg: originpage.com/page-gone sends me a link to mysite.com/product1. Screamingfrog pings originpage.com/page-gone, and returns a Status error. Do I add the originpage.com/page-gone in the disavow file or not? Hope Im making sense 🙂
Technical SEO | | IgorMateski0 -
404 error - but I can't find any broken links on the referrer pages
Hi, My crawl has diagnosed a client's site with eight 404 errors. In my CSV download of the crawl, I have checked the source code of the 'referrer' pages, but can't find where the link to the 404 error page is. Could there be another reason for getting 404 errors? Thanks for your help. Katharine.
Technical SEO | | PooleyK0 -
How to remove the 4XX Client error,Too many links in a single page Warning and Cannonical Notices.
Firstly,I am getting around 12 Errors in the category 4xx Client error. The description says that this is either bad or a broken link.How can I repair this ? Secondly, I am getting lots of warnings related to too many page links of a single page.I want to know how to tackle this ? Finally, I don't understand the basics of Cannonical notices.I have around 12 notices of this kind which I want to remove too. Please help me out in this regard. Thank you beforehand. Amit Ganguly http://aamthoughts.blogspot.com - Sustainable Sphere
Technical SEO | | amit.ganguly0 -
Does Google pass link juice a page receives if the URL parameter specifies content and has the Crawl setting in Webmaster Tools set to NO?
The page in question receives a lot of quality traffic but is only relevant to a small percent of my users. I want to keep the link juice received from this page but I do not want it to appear in the SERPs.
Technical SEO | | surveygizmo0 -
.com or .co.uk in UK index? but the .com has higher domain authority...
Hi there i have a .com and a .co.uk for a site that has been around a while. However not much seo has been done on it, i was wonderign do i continue to optimise for the .com or switch to the .co.uk to rank in Google UK index for various search terms. .COM = 40 domain authority .CO.UK - 10 domain authority. Let the debate start 🙂
Technical SEO | | pauledwards0