Can improving page authority on all pages help overall domain auth?

[acsilver]

Our website is made up of approx 4000 pages - some of which are old pages with a pa of 1.

I am removing these pages (ensuring they don't have links etc). Can removing so many low scoring and useless pages impact on domain authority.

Our DA jumped 4 points and i wondered if this was helping

Example

4000 pages in total

2500 have PA 1 - these get removed

will it look better for DA that overall there are now no pages where PA =1 and the site now contains higher PA pages only?

[ThomasHarvey]

Stop trying to sculpt your site to get a better DA, ultimately Moz's DA and PA are metrics, you shouldn't be changing your site around these purely. Instead what you need to be doing it trying to tweak your site to what's best for the user. Do these pages add value to the site and if not what can you do to improve them, if they can't be improved then remove them.

The key metric you should be looking at is the number of visitors that you are getting.

[Ria_]

Seems you're on the right track, but I wouldn't pay too close attention to the PA and instead focus on culling the pages that offer no value to the user. The pages that are perhaps duplicate content, or can be merged with another page to create a stronger, more relevant page. Reducing or pruning the number of thin pages to maximise the value and quality of the pages you keep will help with the overall health of your website.

If you only look at PA, then you may end up getting rid of a potentially valuable page that simply didn't have the opportunity to perform well before.

[jocameron]

Hi Gemma,

I would agree with these answers from Thomas and Ria, and I would add that the Domain Authority calculation is based on dozens of factors includes link counts, MozRank and MozTrust scores etc, it's not just a tally of the authority of all your pages.

https://moz.com/learn/seo/domain-authority

I usually use high PA to help guide me towards pages that I want to action fixes on, for example missing title tags or any other errors highlighted through the site crawl. However I would be careful inverting this to cull pages with PA 1 without further assessing their value.

I hope this helps!

Jo

[acsilver]

HI Thomas,

Oh don't worry i am removing them to improve the site for many reasons not simply moz metrics.

I simply wondered if it would have an effect on this also.

Gemma

[acsilver]

Thanks JO,

Yes i just wondered if it could impact over da also. I am carrying out this task as the pages are poor so will continue regardless, but just thought "i wonder if ..."

[acsilver]

Hi Ria,

thanks for your reply, yes i am pruning out the bad pages, however i am looking at many factors not just PA. So seems i am on the right track and will continue

Gemma