Page Authority vs Domain Authority

[FDC]

I'm using the site explorer to compare a potential  clients site against 4 others, in an incredibly competitive market.

Each of their competitiors has a higher page authority (on the home page) than their domain authority. This is untrue for the clients site. (which have much lower metrics all round)

Any input as to what this means/says about their competitors who I would guess (looking at some of their backlink profiles) have done some failry widespread grey hat stuff in the past. (Though haven't we all )

[akaigotchi]

Hi, just today Rand Fishkin released another Whiteboard Friday, which almost exactly tackles that topic. Okay the Whiteboard Friday is on Googles PageRank, but he almost certainly explains an awful lot on Seomoz' own ranking parameters and also tackles the question what a good domain authority and bad page authority meand. Definitely worth watching

http://itunes.apple.com/ch/podcast/whiteboard-friday/id411307102 (2011-08-12 PageRank.mov)

Sorry for the itunes link, but the podcast hasn't appeared on seomoz.org yet (sure it will a bit later..)

PS: In a nutshell: High domain authority is much more important, than high page authority. A good domain can give you much more "link juice" than a good article. Or as Rand says it in the vid: A link from an article on CNN with a low PageRank / page authority? Go grab that stuff! It is on CNN!!!! Hope that helped

[Bevelwise]

The majority of their links could all be pointing to their home page and they may not have many deep links, which can explain why the page authority for their home page is higher than the domain authority.