Domain Authority vs Page Authority, What’s The Difference?

Domain Authority vs Page Authority – Simply put, Authority is a qualitative measure of any web property that significantly affects the property’s overall visibility and rankings in search engines. it is a critical focus for most SEO experts.
Practically authority alone can’t guarantee search visibility, therefor you also need contextual relevance with the query, but it’s a strong indicator of your overall search engine optimization performance.
One of the best-known measures of “authority” has been “PageRank,”. This is an algorithm created by Google’s Larry Page and designed to measure the quality and authority of a specific web page based on the number, quality, and relevance of links pointing to it.
Also, Moz has created a number of different qualitative measures for authority, including MozRank and MozTrust, but most importantly, they’re the ones who coined the phrase “domain authority,” which refers to the overall authoritative strength of an entire web domain.
For this article, i would like to ignore some of the technical differences between these terms and narrow my focus to two main areas that are most relevant for SEO campaigns, which are;

1. Domain authority: This refers to the authoritative strength of an entire domain, and
2. Page authority: which refers to the authoritative strength of a single page on that domain.

Domain Authority vs. Page Authority

Domain Authority:
Strategies and Effects
Taking a look at ways you can increase your domain authority. It’s impossible to objectively increase your domain authority directly or suddenly, but these practices can improve your position over time:

• Create lots of high-quality content on your website with a tight internal linking structure.
• Work on earning lots of high-quality inbound links, in terms of external source authority and link relevance
• Remove bad links pointing to your site
• Be patient; domain authority increases slowly.

With these practices, you’ll slowly and steadily increase your domain authority. With a higher domain authority, all pages (including all your subdomains) will have a higher chance of ranking for relevant queries.
Domain authority also offers lots of flexibility in terms of how, where, and when you create content and links. It also carries wider effects (site-wide). The flip side is the amount of time and effort it takes to increase – far more than page authority.
Also Read: Page Authority: what it is, why it’s important for SEO
Page Authority:
Strategies and Effects
let’s also take a look at some of the ways you can influence page authority:

• Create a page on a domain with a high authority.
• Ensure the content of your chosen page is highly detailed, relevant, and original.
• Make sure your page is fully functional and optimized for SEO.
• Include internal linking to and from the page.
• Earn lots of high-quality inbound links, in terms of external source authority and link relevance (these must point to your chosen page).
• Remove bad links pointing to your site (chosen page).

Does these look familiar? Most of the rules that apply to domain authority also applies to page authority, just on a smaller scale.
Note:

1. Domain authority and Page authority also have a mutually beneficial relationship; building more links to your individual pages will have the effect of raising your domain authority, and raising your domain authority in general will increase the page authority of your individual pages.
2. Page authority builds faster than Domain authority, giving you a critical advantage if you need to improve search engine rankings for one page quickly.

Objectively, investing in domain authority is better over the long-term, and if given enough time, will earn you more inbound traffic (since you’ll be increasing the ranking potential for many pages at once). Hence, domain authority demands at least a share of your focus; focusing exclusively on one page and one page alone will stifle your campaign’s growth.
The opposite scenario, optimizing only for domain authority and not for page authority, is a feasible long-term strategy. This is, in essence, a focus on building your brand overall. The pages that stand out will naturally attract more links and authority on their own, and you’ll suffer no short-term or long-term consequences for not providing extra boosts to those individual pages.

Conclusion

Domain Authority and Page Authority are important metrics to your search visibility.
The key to balancing the use of both metrics is to focus on their purpose and being strategic about it right from your digital strategy down to implementation.