Page Authority is a close cousin of Domain Authority, and the two are easily confused. Where Domain Authority estimates the strength of your whole website, Page Authority estimates the strength of a single individual page. Understanding the difference, and the shared caveats, helps you read the numbers agencies quote at you with a clear and sceptical eye.
Here is what Page Authority is, how it differs from Domain Authority, and how to keep it in sensible perspective.
The straightforward definition
Page Authority is a score, typically from 1 to 100, that predicts how well a specific individual page is likely to rank in search results. The higher the score, the stronger that particular page is judged to be.
The crucial distinction is the level it applies to. Domain Authority looks at the strength of your entire website as a whole. Page Authority zooms in on one single page. So your website might have a certain Domain Authority overall, while each individual page on it has its own separate Page Authority, and these can vary considerably. Your homepage might have a high Page Authority because many sites link to it, while a new blog post you published yesterday might have a very low one because nothing links to it yet.
As with Domain Authority, one point must be stated plainly, because it is where a lot of confusion and some deliberate mischief live. Page Authority is not a Google metric. Google does not use it and does not recognise it. It was created by the SEO software company Moz as a third-party estimate, and other tools have their own equivalents under different names. It is a clever, useful approximation of a page’s strength, not a verdict handed down by Google.
What influences it
Page Authority is estimated mainly by looking at the links pointing to that specific page, both from other websites and from elsewhere on your own site, along with the overall strength of the website the page sits on.
This is why individual pages on the same site can have very different scores. A page that has attracted lots of quality backlinks, and is well linked from strong pages elsewhere on your site, will tend to have a higher Page Authority than a neglected page that nothing points to. It also explains why internal linking, covered elsewhere in this glossary, can influence a page’s strength: by deliberately linking to an important page from other pages on your site, you can help support its authority.
Why it can be useful
Used sensibly, Page Authority helps answer a practical question: how strong is this particular page, and how realistic is it that it could rank well for its target term?
It is most useful for comparison and prioritisation. If you want a specific page to rank for a specific term, comparing its Page Authority to that of the pages currently ranking for that term gives you a rough sense of how much ground you have to make up. It can also help you identify your strongest pages, which are useful anchors to link out from, and your weaker important pages, which might need more support.
So as a comparative, diagnostic tool, Page Authority has genuine value, in the same way Domain Authority does. It gives you an approximate, comparable sense of page strength in a world where Google keeps its actual workings private.
The same trap, at page level
Everything said about the dangers of Domain Authority applies equally to Page Authority, and it is worth repeating because the temptation to misuse it is just as strong.
Because Page Authority is a number that can be measured and charted, it can easily be turned into a vanity metric. An agency could show you a page’s Page Authority creeping upward and present it as proof of success. But a rising third-party score is not the same as your business getting more customers. It is entirely possible for a page’s Page Authority to climb while it brings in no more enquiries or sales at all. A number going up is not, by itself, a result.
There is also the same unpleasant corner of the industry that tries to inflate these scores artificially through low-quality links, producing a nicer-looking number while doing nothing useful, or even causing harm. A Page Authority pumped up with rubbish links is worse than meaningless.
So the rule is the same as for Domain Authority: treat Page Authority as a useful bit of context, never as the scoreboard. It can inform your thinking and your comparisons, but it must never become the headline measure of whether your marketing is working.
Why it matters for your business
Page Authority is worth understanding mainly so that you can interpret it correctly when it appears in reports and conversations, and so that you are not misled by it. Knowing that it is a third-party estimate, that it applies to individual pages, and that it is a means rather than an end, puts you in a strong position to use it wisely and to spot when someone is leaning on it as a vanity number.
It also usefully reinforces a couple of ideas from elsewhere in this glossary: that individual pages have their own strength, that internal linking can help support your important pages, and that the real measure of success always comes back to customers rather than scores.
What a business owner should actually do about it
It is perfectly fine to take an interest in the Page Authority of your key pages, and to ask how they compare to the pages you are trying to outrank. That is a sensible, informative question. What you should resist is letting that number become the thing you judge success by.
When an agency discusses Page Authority, keep steering the conversation back to what actually matters. Is this page bringing in more of the right visitors? Are those visitors enquiring and buying? A page’s third-party authority score is only ever useful insofar as it supports those real outcomes.
Page Authority, like its bigger sibling Domain Authority, is a handy tool that informs the work rather than the result you are paying for. The result is a page that brings your business real customers. Keeping that firmly in view, and treating the score as a means to it rather than an end in itself, is exactly the kind of clear, grounded thinking that keeps you focused on what genuinely counts.
