Page Authority
Page Authority (PA) is a score from Moz that predicts how well a single page could rank, on a 100-point logarithmic scale built from link data. It is a third-party estimate meant for comparing pages against competitors, not a signal Google uses.
That last point causes most of the confusion. A page can show a modest Page Authority and still outrank pages with far higher numbers, and a page with a high score can sit on page three for months. Neither outcome means the metric is broken. It means the metric is a forecast made from outside Google, and forecasts need context before anyone acts on them.
Page Authority at a Glance
Page Authority belongs to Moz, a search software company. In its September 2020 announcement of a model update, Moz described PA as a proprietary metric that does not directly affect search engine rankings, and said it informs SEOs about the strength of an individual page on a 100-point logarithmic scale. The same release said PA and its sibling metric, Domain Authority, should always be read as relative numbers, used to compare ranking potential against direct competitors in the search results.
So there are three things to hold on to. PA scores one URL, not a whole site. It predicts, it does not measure an outcome. And it only makes sense next to other scores.
Everything else in this entry follows from those three facts.
How Moz Calculates Page Authority
A Machine-Learned Model Built on Link Data
In its September 2020 model-update announcement, Moz described the metric as running on a machine-learned, neural network model that used more than 40 link-related inputs to gauge a page's strength and ranking potential. That input count comes from the 2020 announcement, not from a currently verified specification (source: Moz press release via Business Wire, 2020; model specification as announced, global, confidence: verified as stated by Moz in 2020). The 2020 update was announced with added inputs such as Spam Score and the identification of link quality patterns, a detail also covered in MediaPost's report on the planned change.
Moz does not publish a factor-by-factor weighting. That matters in practice. Nobody outside Moz can tell you that ten new links from a given site will add a fixed number of points, because the model weighs its inputs together and the weights are not public.
The inputs Moz describes are link-related. Your page's backlinks, as Moz's own crawler finds them, are the raw material. That also means the score can only reflect links that Moz has discovered, which may differ from the links Google has found.
Why the Scale Is Logarithmic
Moz describes PA as logarithmic, not linear. In plain terms, each step up the scale represents a larger jump in underlying link strength than the step before it. Moving a page between two low scores usually takes less than moving it the same distance near the top.
This is why point differences are hard to compare across the range. A five-point gap between two pages scoring in the twenties says something quite different from a five-point gap between two pages scoring in the seventies, so a team that reports "we gained five points" without saying where on the scale those points sit has not told anyone very much.
Why Scores Move When Your Page Did Not Change
When Moz announced the 2020 model change, it warned that SEOs might notice fluctuations in their own Page Authority scores and should examine those changes within the context of their competitors and industry. That warning applies to any model revision. A score can drop because Moz's model or link index changed, not because anything happened to your page.
The fix is simple. Check whether competing pages moved too. If they did, the shift is probably in the measuring tool, and your relative position may be unchanged.
Page Authority Is Not a Google Ranking Factor
Moz says PA does not directly affect search rankings. Google says something similar from its side. In its guidance on third-party SEO tools (updated June 2026), Google states that third-party tools do not have access to its internal ranking data, cannot guarantee performance, and that any predictions they make are their own. Google also recommends Search Console as the first-party source of data about how a site performs in Google Search.
Google does not rank pages by PA. Its predictions are Moz's own.
What Google Says It Uses Instead
Google does use links, through its own systems. Its guide to ranking systems (updated December 2025) lists link analysis systems, including PageRank, and says PageRank has evolved a great deal since launch and remains part of Google's core ranking systems. The original idea is set out in Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page's paper, The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, which describes PageRank as a measure of citation importance that does not count every link equally.
The same Google guide also says its ranking systems are designed to work at the page level, using many signals and systems, with site-wide signals contributing to its understanding of pages. Links are one input among many. Google's link best practices (updated December 2025) say it uses links as a signal of relevance and as a way to discover new pages, which is narrower than "links decide rankings."
Why a Third-Party Prediction Can Still Help
A score Google ignores can still be useful, as long as you treat it as an outside estimate of link strength. Links do still correlate with rankings, though weakly. In a vendor study of the top 1,000,000 US keywords by search volume, Ahrefs found Spearman correlations with top-20 rankings of 0.255 for the number of referring domains and 0.248 for the number of backlinks (source: Ahrefs, January 2025, updated August 2026; metric: Spearman correlation; geography: United States; confidence: reported, vendor methodology). The study's authors describe these as weak correlations and state plainly that correlation does not prove causation.
None of those figures are Page Authority statistics. They describe link counts, not Moz's score. What they show is that link strength is one input with modest predictive value, which is roughly the role a link-based prediction like PA can play in an analysis.
Page Authority vs. Domain Authority
Page Authority scores a single URL. Domain Authority is the Moz metric for a whole domain, and Moz describes both as metrics built to clarify the strength of pages and domains. The two are often quoted together, which is where the trouble starts.
A strong domain does not guarantee that every page on it is strong. Google makes the same point about its own systems: in its ranking systems guide, it says having some good site-wide signals does not mean all content from a site will always rank highly. For a specific query, the page that answers it is the unit that competes.
The same Ahrefs study offers a small, related data point. Domain Rating, a site-level metric, correlated at 0.131 with rankings, while the count of referring domains to the ranking page itself correlated at 0.255 (source: Ahrefs, 2025; metric: Spearman correlation; geography: United States; confidence: reported, vendor methodology). Both are vendor metrics, neither is PA or DA, and the result does not prove that page-level signals cause better rankings.
| Measure | Who produces it | What it describes | Used by Google to rank? | Best use |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Page Authority | Moz | Predicted ranking strength of one URL, from link data | No | Comparing your page with pages in the same results |
| Domain Authority | Moz | Predicted strength at the domain level | No | Comparing sites, not individual pages |
| PageRank | Google's own link analysis system, not published as a score | Yes, as one of its core ranking systems | Understanding why links matter at all | |
| Search Console data | Observed clicks, impressions, CTR and average position | Not a ranking input, it reports outcomes | Checking what actually happened in Search |
How to Read Page Authority Against Competitors
Compare Pages Ranking for the Same Query
Start with the search results page you care about. List the URLs that rank for the query, then check PA for each of those exact URLs, not their home pages. Your page's score only means something in that lineup.
If your page sits well below the pages ranking above it, link strength may be one gap worth investigating. If it sits close to them, or above them, the gap probably lies somewhere else, such as how well the page matches search intent or how useful its content is for the task behind the query.
Record the URL, Tool, Date and Query
Write down four things every time. The exact URL checked, the tool used, the date, and the query you are benchmarking against.
Without those notes, a later comparison can mislead you. A score taken after a model revision is not directly comparable with one taken before it, and a URL with tracking parameters or a different protocol may be scored separately from the canonical version you meant to measure.
| Record | What to write down | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| URL | The exact URL checked, not the home page | A URL with tracking parameters or a different protocol may be scored separately from the canonical version you meant to measure |
| Tool | The tool used for the check | Vendors use different link indexes and models, so compare Moz scores with Moz scores |
| Date | The day the score was taken | A score taken after a model revision is not directly comparable with one taken before it |
| Query | The search query you are benchmarking against | Your page's score only means something next to the pages ranking for that query |
Keep Every Comparison Inside One Tool
Different vendors publish their own page-level and domain-level scores. They use different link indexes and different models, so their numbers are not interchangeable. Compare Moz scores with Moz scores.
Common Misreadings of a "Good" Score
"Anything Above 50 Is Good"
There is no universal threshold. Moz itself frames PA as a relative metric for comparing ranking potential against direct competitors in the results. A score that would lead one set of results could trail badly in another, so the useful question is never "is 40 good?" but "how does 40 compare with the pages I am trying to outrank?"
"A Strong Domain Lifts Every Page"
It does not, at least not automatically. A new page on an established site still has to earn its own links and still has to answer its query well. Google's statement that good site-wide signals do not guarantee every page ranks highly applies here directly.
"More Backlinks Add Predictable Points"
The model combines its link-related inputs on a logarithmic scale. That rules out any simple conversion from link counts to points. Two pages can gain the same number of links and move by very different amounts.
"Better Content Raises the Score Directly"
The inputs Moz describes are link-related. Rewriting a page may help it rank and may help it attract links over time, and those links are what the model can see. The content edit itself is not what the score is built to measure.
Strengthening the Signals Behind the Score
Chasing the number is the wrong goal. The useful work is earning genuine links to pages that deserve them, which is the core of link building done well.
Google's spam policies (updated August 2026) define link spam as creating links primarily to manipulate search rankings, including buying or selling links for ranking purposes, excessive link exchanges, and using automated programs to create links. Sites that violate those policies may rank lower or not appear at all. Gaming a third-party score through those tactics risks the outcome that actually matters.
Your own site also shapes how link signals flow. Google's link guidance says every page you care about should be linked from at least one other page on your site, which is a practical reason to review internal linking for important pages. Google's canonicalization guidance (updated July 2026) explains that specifying a canonical URL helps consolidate signals, such as links, from duplicate or similar URLs into one preferred URL, and recommends linking internally to the canonical version.
Teams that want this handled as part of a broader program can look at SEO services that treat technical, content and link work as one plan.
When Page Authority and Search Data Disagree
This is where the metric earns its keep, or gets misused. PA is a prediction from outside Google. Search Console's Performance report shows what happened inside Google Search: clicks, impressions, click-through rate and average position, with a default view of the past three months. When the two disagree, the observed data wins, and the disagreement becomes something to investigate rather than a reason to panic.
- PA rises, clicks stay flat. Check whether the page is indexed, whether the query has the demand you assumed, and whether the results page itself changed.
- PA stays flat, clicks rise. Look at content and query coverage. Rankings can improve for reasons the link model cannot see.
- PA falls, search performance holds. Check whether competing pages fell too. A model or index change is a likely cause.
- PA and clicks both fall. Look for a shared cause, such as lost links, a redirect problem or a changed URL. Moving in the same direction does not prove one caused the other.
Read this way, PA is a diagnostic lead, not a scoreboard. It points to one possible gap, link strength, in a broader picture of SEO that Google evaluates with many signals at once.
Page Authority FAQs
Is Page Authority a Google ranking factor?
No. Moz describes PA as a proprietary metric that does not directly affect search rankings, and Google says third-party tools have no access to its internal ranking data.
What is a good Page Authority score?
There is no universal good score. Compare your page with the pages ranking for the same query, using the same tool, and judge the gap from there.
What is the difference between Page Authority and Domain Authority?
PA estimates the strength of one URL. Domain Authority estimates strength at the domain level. A strong domain does not guarantee that every page on it will rank.
How do I check Page Authority?
Moz shows its authority metrics in tools including Link Explorer and the MozBar browser extension, and through its API. Check the exact URL you want to compare, then record the date.
Why did my Page Authority drop?
Moz has warned that model changes can move scores. Check whether competing pages moved too before assuming your page lost strength, and confirm with Search Console whether anything changed in actual search performance.
Can a page with lower Page Authority outrank one with a higher score?
Yes. PA is a link-based prediction, while Google ranks pages using many systems and signals. Relevance to the query and the usefulness of the content can outweigh a gap in link strength.
