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Thanks Chris, Bernadette and Donna for your thoughtful answers.  After considering your advice (and the resources you shared), I think it's worth a try.  If nothing else, it will be a good experiment (and fairly low risk -- even though the pdf ranks #1, it's not a high-volume term).  I think it will be important for the landing page to provide a really meaty, useful synopsis (as Chris suggested) that still offers some value on its own.  Thanks again! -John

Hi there! Difficulty score is solely based on the DA and PA for the top ranking sites for a particular keyword. The only occasion we would take your site's Domain Authority or Page Authority into account is if you yourself were ranking in one of those top spots. So, the Difficulty score would be the same for everyone who searched at that particular time. I hope that clarifies things!

Thanks Robert and Erick for your quick and thoughtful answers!  Robert, to clarify based on your foursquare dilemma, we are currently in situation 1) and it sounds like we ought to move to situation 4). Erick, regarding the point you make in reason #4 ("the way you have it set up right now you may not be getting the DA of your parent site anyway") -- It appears that in terms of DA, www.parent.com and blogs.parent.com are the same.  However, the TF and CF for blogs.parent.com are significantly lower than www.parent.com (and lower than www.child.com), so I think your point is valid. I hear what you're saying regarding the Parent/Child relationship and the need to be careful.  I think our situation is very much analogous to the P&G example, so I think we'd be fine. Thanks again to you both for the great insights!