Page authority vs domain authority

[slazarus]

when evaluating a website for a potential link request, do you focus more on page authority or domain authority?   do you use them together? what about when the two numbers are very far apart?

[NerdsOnCall]

You should definitely watch this whiteboard friday video, it will explain a lot about Google PR. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/what-is-googles-pagerank-good-for-whiteboard-friday .

Page authority (namned after Larry page) only rates the authority of an individual page, so alone PR does not guarantee a good link. I believe search engines combine PR and DA (among other things) to decide the value of a link. Domain Authority is harder to build than PR, so I give DA more weight then PR.

There are a few reasons the numbers can be far apart. Often, homepages have higher PR then their DA. Sometimes /blog sub folders have a higher PR then DA because they have a lot of links, and social media engagement, this isn't a bad thing, but make sure the root domain isn't a spammy site.

When looking for links, I would be more concerned about getting links that will send high quality customers to your site. If a site fits that criteria,and it isn't a spammy site, then their PR doesn't matter very much.