A couple of questions

[cmjolley]

1)  My competitor has 20 links and a PA of 30, and a DA of 16.  I thought from reading info here on SEOmoz that PA is a lot harder to influence and you have to raise up your overall DA to bring up the PA as well?  I'm just trying to figure out how the heck she's managed to get a PA of 30 with so few links and ALL the numbers from the SEO campaign lower than mine.  Does navigational structure and deep links with pages with every keyword have anything to do with it?  Just want to learn as much as I can about this and how to raise PA...thanks.  I've been reading as much as I can on here and on google but if you guys have any more suggestions that would be great. x

2. How often is the SEO moz toolbar updated?  Its been over a month and I've been working very hard on improving things and finding ways to get more links but its stayed the same?  Also noticed that SEO moz doesn't crawl as many pages as I've got indexed with Google...why is this?

Thanks for your help

[inhouseseo]

The PA is based on onpage and offpage factors. The links to that page have the highest impact along with the quality and freshness of content. Just looking at the metrics is not going to answer your questions. That site may have fewer links that yours, but not all links are created equal. One link from a quality and relevant site is worth 10 (just throwing a number out) mediocre links.

I don't know how often SEOmoz indexes pages. I assume they are always crawling and indexing. In my experience, majestic SEO has a larger index of links/pages. The best place to checkout the links and rankings for your site is Google WT.

[RyanKent]

Hi Christine,

I have to disagree a bit with inhouseseo. PA is not based on onpage factors at all. You can create a "hello world" page that is otherwise blank and earn high PA for the page. You can also offer the most perfectly designed web page with fantastic content and still have low PA. The PA calculation is based on links to the page. The more links you earn from high authority pages, the better your PA.

You can learn all about Page Authority here: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/page-authority. One important note is PA is algorithmic in nature. It is really easy to jump to a PA of 30. The higher you go, the harder it gets to move the needed.

Regarding the SEO moz toolbar, the PA/DA metrics are updated roughly once per month. The next update is scheduled for July 6th. You can see the update calendar here: https://seomoz.zendesk.com/entries/345964-linkscape-update-schedule

Regarding the comparison with Google, no one crawls more pages then Google. Consider each monthly crawl update costs around $500k for SEOmoz. Google probably spends millions each day. The more links you earn to your site's pages, the better the site will appear in OSE and similar tools.

[Adam.Whittles]

Just to add to this....

I'm not sure why you are so concerned with PA and DA metrics. Whilst useful, you should not be getting to obsessed with influencing these metrics. Surely your overall goal should be to outrank your competitors in search engines rather than beating their PA and DA scores? Of course, with a successfully implemented SEO strategy you should find these will naturally improve along with your rankings.

Concentrate more on your overall SEO strategy rather than trying to improve just your PA and DA.