Higher PA and DA but lower ranking?

[Entertainment]

I am having problem with my product pages not ranking as high as I would expect them to be.

http://i.imgur.com/z3aTwUG.png (or see attachement)

This is an example. The fact that competitor C is on position 4 stupifies me. At what areas should I be looking?

z3aTwUG.png

[MattRoney]

I agree with the sentiment here, Moosa, but know that PA and DA do take link quality into account, and they won't necessarily go up when you get new links. There's actually a huge number of factors that goes into calculating those metrics. (Check out our overview of Page Authority here, and of Domain Authority here.)

For example, both metrics consider MozTrust, which measures the inherent "trust value" of linking sites. So to use a pretty simple scenario, if you gain a few links from less-trusted (but not necessarily bad) sites, and lose one link from a very high-trust site, you may actually see PA and DA decrease.

It's not unheard of for a high-trust site to go offline and drop the DA and PA of any sites it had linked to, as well as sites those sites link to. That's one of the reasons that we generally recommend using DA and PA to benchmark yourself against your competitors rather than as an absolute measure of your "rankability." Make sense?

Just wanted to set the record straight.

[Alick300]

I'm fully agree with Moosa and he explained very welll.

Thanks

[MoosaHemani]

PA and DA might indicate how many links are pointing back to your website but this is not the only thing that is important to consider when plan ranking better in SERPs from the targeted key phrases.

Again, DA increases when links pointing to your website increases but it does not measure quality of link and how relevant it is to your website. Other things you should consider including is quality of content on the website, internal linking, how powerful the link is and few more.

There are times when you actually deserve better ranking but some websites are outranking you using tactics that are prohibited by Google. In that case you can report them to Google or wait for the update as these things usually cutoff as soon as  the Google launches the algo update.

Hope this helps!

[Alick300]

Hi Entertainment,

I am sharing an old post & an article by Matt  some quotes from moz staff & SEO Expert on this.

http://a-moz.groupbuyseo.org/blog/going-beyond-moz-metrics-to-answer-why-is-this-site-outranking-me

http://a-moz.groupbuyseo.org/community/q/high-da-pa-and-a-grade-at-page-level-not-ranking-in-serp-why

Keri Morgret said that on the same issue "Google uses their own algorithm, and we haven't been able to convince them to use Moz Metrics for ranking or to give us access to an API for their algorithm."

Hope it helps.

Thanks

[Keszi]

Try getting back to the basics. Create an audit for the website, for the webpages that you'd like to rank for. Check for accessibility.

For example on one of our projects a simple development error caused our new content to be hidden from search engines (a simple content tab that had an issue with Javascript).

Sometimes getting back to the basics and creating an auditing for our website could highlight issues that stop us from ranking on top 10 spots.

[Entertainment]

Thanks Keszi. Yes it's not a ranking guarantee (as nothing is). It just feels like we're doing something horribly wrong. We write unique texts for our products, we get an A grading in the on-page grader, we have rich content on the page....

[Keszi]

Domain Authority (DA) - indicates how likely a domain is to rank based on how authoritative search engines consider it to be based on its backlink profile.

Page Authority (PA) - indicates how likely a page is to rank based on how authoritative search engines consider it to be because of which sites link to it

I have quoted these from the Moz Glossary.

It is important to highlight the usage of the word Likely! Having higher DA or PA doesn't necessary mean, that you are going to outrank a specific website. DA and PA are mostly based upon the links that a specific website/webpage get. (at least this is how I look at it).

There are so many other things that could influence a webpage's rankings.

I hope it helped,

Keszi