Why Page Authority = 1

[camarin_w]

Hi everyone!

Long time reader, first time-submitter. I'm working with a client who has an old, established domain and brand name, decent DA score (43 overall, 52 for their home page), but almost all the rest of the pages of their small-ish website have a PA of 1. The domain itself has been around since 2000. The pages ranking at a 1 are not new URLs, they have a sitemap submitted to Google, are not being blocked by robots.txt, there's no auto-redirects or meta-refresh, and the response code for all pages is 200.  What else am I missing? What could be causing this?

TIA for the help!

[samantha.chapman]

Hi there - Sam from Moz's help team here!

Our Page Authority (PA) is a metric that comes from our Mozscape Index. You can read more about the metric here. Much of the time, pages that have a PA of 1 haven't yet been discovered by our index crawler. You can always use Open Site Explorer to check on whether they are included in the index, and which links we have discovered.

Small sites generally won't stay in our index if we don't find new links to a domain. Our cache will remove a link after 190 days unless re-crawled. You can look in Just Discovered (https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/just-discovered?site=moz.com&filter=&source=&target=page&page=1&sort=crawled) to see if your domain is in queue for re-indexing from new discovered links. If not, you will want to keep link building on sites that have high authority and are likely able to be picked up.

You can see our most recently updated index schedule here as well as some more technical metrics on our Mozscape API Updates page. You can also see when the last and next updates happened on the Open Site Explorer (OSE) homepage at any time.

Just a few points on how we compile our index:

• We grab the most recent index.
• We take the top 10 billion URLs with the highest MozRank (with a fixed limit on some of the larger domains).
• We start crawling from the top down until we've crawled ~130 billion URLs

The idea here is that we're focusing on the highest-quality links we can find, coming from the most prominent pages of authoritative sites. So, while you may not see every link for a site within our index, we're aiming to report the most valuable ones available!

Most new sites and links will be indexed by our spiders and available in Mozscape and Open Site Explorer within 60 days, but some take even longer for many reasons - including the crawl-ability of sites, the number of inbound links to them, and the depth of pages in subdirectories.

I hope this helps! If you have any other questions, please feel free to post them here or shoot over an email to help@moz.com.