How to increase Page Authority

[Veebs]

Hi All,

I have had some free time lately and have wanted to try and figure out how Moz calculates page authority and what I can do to increase page authority.

For instance, I have a real estate site (As some of you may know already) and of course there are places like Zillow.com who have amazing Domain Authority and even page authority for a certain address. So this is just some random address to where most of the local sites I compete with have a PA of 1. Is there a way to get that PA up? Would it be sharing it on Social Media, or writing a blog post about it (which I of course would not want do do with every listing (hundreds) but was curious how Zillow could have such a high page rank on a property that maybe came up a day or two ago.

Examples: zillow: http://goo.gl/99A57C                 my site: http://goo.gl/K6xmW6

Thanks for any guidance!

[DirkC]

From the definition of Page Authority:

"Unlike other SEO metrics, Page Authority is difficult to influence directly. It is made up of an aggregate of metrics (MozRank,MozTrust, link profile, and more) that each have an impact on this score. This was done intentionally; this metric is meant to approximate how competitive a given site is in Google.com. Since Google takes a lot of factors into account, a metric that tries to calculate it must incorporate a lot of factors, as well."

In the case of Zillow - given the fact that this is a extremely strong domain - it's quite easy to guess where the strong Page Authority is coming from - lots of (internal) links from a very strong domain.

In your case, probably the best way to increase page authority is increase the strength of your domain: getting useful links), work on user engagement, having great content, ... and so on - with the knowledge that it will almost impossible to beat sites like Zillow (much like your local bookstore is facing the almost impossible task to beat Amazon).

Dirk

[Veebs]

Dirk,

Thanks man. I do understand I can't outrank Zillow. That would be a never ending climb unless I had a few 10's of billions lying around and 3000 employees. I get that. And I do appreciate the insight.

What if I did internal links? Would that not help my page authority go up a bit if it's an internal link from the home page mabye? Or if I shot a youtube video and wrote a great description and then posted a link to that exact page? Any thoughts on that from anyone?

[DirkC]

Off course internal links would help. It would also help if you could enrich your content with data/content that Zillow is not providing. Video's could be indeed a good idea, floor plan, more info on the neighbourhood, schools, ...etc would be great.

As most people are not searching for individual homes, but rather for homes in a certain neighbourhood) - you could try to focus on enriching the content on these pages (if you check http://www.zillow.com/oxford-oh/ - it's not really rich in content - you could use your knowledge of this specific region to enrich your homepage. You already do this on your homepage - but it's very long, with few images and trying to tackle all kind of questions. Consider splitting this page in smaller chunks. You regional pages are better - but could still be enriched with more images, put links to other useful sources (schools,...), statistics about people who live there (average age, income,...). The video's you put are very static - and the one I checked had no sound. On your homepage you mention that Esplanade Ridge is the preferred area for alumni, parents of students - however on the detail page you mention nothing about this but rather a dry, almost technical description of the area.

Dirk

[Guest]

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[Veebs]

Thanks Chris! When you say putting the video on my site and linking it to my original article, do you mean if I make a video for ABC subdivision that I would make a link from the youtube description to the original article? As well as post my video on that same article? If so, that's what I plan on doing.

Thanks!

[Veebs]

Great insight again Dirk. So my thoughts here from what you said:

Right now you saw that my content and video's are a bit dry and generic. That is very true. I have actually had no time to go in and get deep with it, until  now, which I have a plan set out to enrich the content greatly.

also, it was interesting that you said that the youtube video had no sound. Does that raise cause for concern to you because it's a video and most films aren't silent anymore? If so, this brings me to a super important question in my mind. A lot of these videos have a lot of views. **This question is for any and all that have knowledge on this subject. **Would you recommend I scrap this one? Or keep it up and shoot another one, but put the better video on it's respective neighborhood page and the other one (Stale one) just keep it out in cyber space? As many of those videos actually do rank.

Thanks so much for your Help Dirk and Chris. Much appreciated!!