Page Authority

[Yozzer]

I have recently optimised a set of images for a client of ours:

I'm looking through all the PA of these newly optimised images, and have varying PA {from SEOmoz toolbar} I understand that internal linking will pass link juice, and obviously external links will add to the overall PA.

I have several pages with a PA of 36: { Fairly deep pages} Yet they have no external or internal links going to them.

My question is "How can a page gain any authority when it has no visible links pointing at it?" Obviously there must be a link pointing at it {internally} as Google wouldn't have crawled the page right?

Also lets say all the keywords are of equal competitiveness would the keywords with highest PA rank higher than those on O PA pages.

Many Thanks

[petrakraft]

Can you define what exactely you have done when you optimized the images? Right now I see no coherance between image optimization and link juice / PA ...

[goodnewscowboy]

Hey Sean: The official moz info on how they calculate page authority is as follows: (apologies in advance for the garbled hyperlink. It's some kinda bug either on the mozplex's side or in Opera 11.01

SEOmoz Page Authority

http://www.seomoz.org/dp/page-authorityhttp://www.seomoz.org/dp/page-authority

[Yozzer]

Many thanks **goodnewscowboy: Should have read that first!  **

Your time is greatly appreciated

Sean

[gfiorelli1]

Hi Sean,

I believe that you are confusing PA with PageRank when you talk about internal links passing juice to the linked pages. And I am not so sure that PA and PR works on the same concept (maybe one of SEOmoz staff could provide a better answer)

On the other hand, what it is not clear is what do you mean with optimized images. Do you mean you that you have optimized their Alt text? Or that those images are linked to some page of your client site?

Answering to your question: yes, if Google had crawled the page there must be an internal link pointing to that page.

About your last sentence... again it is not that clear, as keyword or anchor text optimized link does not have any PA assigned, as PA is only page related.

In general terms an anchor text optized link is in a page with a high PR will pass some of that juice to the linked page, and more than if the same link was in a low PR page. But that it is not so obvious, because other factors enter in the game: for instance, if the first page has many more links than the second, the % of juice passed can be even less than the second page would do.

[Yozzer]

Hi Hansj:

Yes, the imgaes that existed had no alt tags, all lived on one URL with a generic page title. So as far as optimising these images goes, I've given them all descriptive and relevant alt tags, H1 tags and page title, and then added to sitemap.xml.

I am now in the process of measuring the sucess of this and thats where the PA came in. So if image A was steadily moving up the SERP's yet Images C & D were having no impact what could be the influencing factors? Obviously there will be many factors asto why, but I thought that PA could play a part in the overall monitoring.

Thanks for the reply