Page Authority Explained: Why the Strength of a Single Page Matters
Most people judge a link by the domain it sits on. That makes sense as a first filter, but a link doesn't come from a domain. It comes from one specific page, and that page can be strong, weak or almost invisible regardless of how famous the site is. Page Authority is Moz's attempt to put a number on that difference.
What Page Authority is
Page Authority (PA) is a score from 1 to 100 that Moz uses to predict how well a single page might rank in search results. It works like Domain Authority but at the URL level. The model looks at the links pointing to that specific page, along with signals from Moz's index, and outputs a logarithmic score.
Ahrefs has an equivalent called URL Rating (UR). The logic is similar: how strong is the link profile of this one URL?
As with all third-party metrics, Google doesn't use PA. It's an estimate built from Moz's crawl data.
Why a page can be weak on a strong domain
Picture a national news site with a very high domain score. It publishes hundreds of articles a day. Yesterday's article about a startup funding round in Bengaluru has zero external links, sits five clicks deep in the archive, and will soon drop off the homepage entirely. Its PA might be low, even though the domain is enormous.
Now picture a small blog about Indian classical music with a modest domain score. Its guide to raga basics has been linked by universities, music schools and forums for years. That single page can have a higher PA than the news article.
If you got a link from each, the second might pass more value to you. Authority flows through links, and a page that receives few links and little internal support has little to pass on. Our article on link equity covers how that flow works.
The guest post problem
This is where PA becomes practical. When you publish a guest post, the article is brand new. It has no external links of its own. Its PA starts low, and whatever authority it has comes from internal links on the host site: the homepage, category pages, the author page, related posts.
So the value of a guest post depends heavily on how the host site links to new content. Before you pitch or pay for a placement, check a few of the site's guest articles from six months ago:
- Are they still linked from a category page, or orphaned?
- Are they indexed in Google? Search for the exact title in quotes.
- Do they have any external links of their own?
- What PA do they show now?
If old guest posts on the site sit at PA 1 with no internal links and aren't indexed, your post will likely end up the same way. That's a weak link, however good the domain looks.
This is also why people build links to their guest posts, as described in powering up guest posts with Tier 2 links. The aim is to raise the authority of that single page so it passes more on. That approach carries its own risks with low-quality links, so keep it measured.
Using PA on your own site
PA is useful for internal decisions too.
Find your strongest pages. Run your domain through Moz or Ahrefs and sort your pages by PA or UR. The top ones are usually the homepage plus a few articles that earned links on their own. These are the best places to add internal links to pages you want to rank.
Protect pages with authority. If a high-PA page is outdated, update it rather than deleting it. If you must remove it, 301 redirect it to the closest relevant page so the links aren't wasted.
Spot surprise winners. A Shopify store selling handloom sarees might find its blog post on caring for silk has a higher PA than any product page because fashion bloggers linked to it. That post deserves internal links pointing to the relevant product categories.
What PA doesn't tell you
PA is about links. It says nothing about:
- Whether the page matches search intent
- Content quality or freshness
- Whether the page is indexed
- Topical relevance to your site
A high-PA page about car insurance linking to your dental clinic in Indore is still an off-topic link. And a page with a modest PA in your exact niche, read by the people you want to reach, may send real visitors and be the more useful link.
PA vs DA when judging a link
| Question | Use |
|---|---|
| Is this site generally established? | Domain score (DA or DR) |
| Will the specific page linking to me have any strength? | Page score (PA or UR) |
| Is the link likely to be seen and indexed? | Manual checks: internal links, indexing, traffic |
| Is it relevant? | Your own judgement |
For an existing page with an existing link (a niche edit, a resource page, a mention in an old article), PA is often the better guide. For a new page that doesn't exist yet, look at how the site treats similar pages.
A quick exercise
Open your backlink tool and export the pages linking to you. Add a column for the PA or UR of each linking page, then sort. You'll probably find that a small number of linking pages carry most of the strength. Look at what those pages have in common: topic, type of site, how they found you. That's the profile of links to go after next.