Page Authority for localized version of website

[Kilgray]

Hello everyone,

I have a case here were I need to decide which steps to take to improve page authority (and thus SEO value) for the German pages on our site. We localized the English version into German at the beginning of 2015.

www.memoq.com - English

de.memoq.com - German

By October 2015 we implemented href tags so that Google would index the pages according to their language. That implementation has been successful. There is one issue though: At that time, all our localized pages had only "1" point for Page Authority ("PA" in the Moz bar). At the beginning we though that this could be due to the fact that localization was done using subdomains (de.memoq.com) rather that subfolders (www.memoq.com/de). However, we decided not to implement changes and to let Google assess the work we had done with the href tags.

Its been a while now, and still all our German pages keep having only "1" point for page authority. Plus we have keywords for which we rank in the top 10 in English (US Google Search), but this not the case for the translated version of the keywords for German (Germany Google search).

So my question basically is:

Is this lack of page authority and SEO value rooted in the fact that we used subdomain instead of subfolder for the URL creation. If so is it likely that Page Authority for German pages and SEO value will increase if I change the structure from subdomains to subfolders?

Or is it that the problem in PA is rooted somewhere else that I am missing?

I appreciate your feedback.

[rjonesx. 0]

Page Authority is based on the links pointing to the page. There are only a handful of links on the web which point to your de.* version of your site, so it wouldn't have any independent Page Authority. Now, my guess is that MozScape simply does not currently project PA through to all of the hreflang variants. I am double checking on this now and should have an answer for you soon.

[Kilgray]

HI,

Thanks for your quick reply and expect your next answer. So the subdomain/subfolder issue is not the actual reason for the "1" point for every German page?

[rjonesx. 0]

Correct. I just confirmed that it is how Mozscape handles the hreflang tag. We do not yet transpose the actual value of the canonical version onto the hreflang variant. You should, in theory, assume the Page Authority of your homepage is identical with the Page Authority of the de.* variant. At least, that appears to be the way in which hreflang is supposed to be handled.