Authority On Authority Question

[94501]

Hi,

What does it mean when seomoz shows our domain authority as 43, but our homepage authority as 52 or higher?

More recently, the two used to be roughly comparable at around 52.

Maybe it doesn't matter, but it did change and it makes me curious.

Thanks!

[Cyrus-Shepard]

This refers to the difference between Page Authority (PA) and Domain Authority (DA)

Where Domain Authority measures the predictive ranking strength of entire domains or subdomains, Page Authority measures the strength of individual page. The same is true for metrics such as MozRank and MozTrust.

It's completely normal to have a homepage PA that is higher or lower than your overall DA. If your homepage PA recently dropped while everything else remained constant, it could indicate that Linkscape didn't find some links pointing to your homepage that it found previously. Normally, this isn't anything to worry about, unless you've seen a corresponding drop in traffic. In this case, I'd check your backlinks.

It's also normal for both PA and DA to fluctuate from update to update. It's a comparative metric, so these metrics are best used when comparing yourself to your competition, instead of tracking your metrics in isolation.  For example, if your DA rises 5 points, this in itself means nothing unless you are comparing it to another domain.