Domain Authority
Domain Authority as the name suggests represent the authority of a domain in Moz Index. It’s a globally known metric created by Moz that determines how well a website rank on the Search engine result pages (SERPs). The domain authority value for a website ranges in between 1-100. Here 1 means the worst and 100 means the best. Generally, 40-50 domain authority is considered as good domain authority for any website.
Domain Authority is determined by linked root domains, number of backlinks, quality of content, Moz trust scores etc. For SEO personals, this score helps to determine the quality of a website quickly. There are various ways exist to check domain authority of a website, the most popular way is to check it through Moz Bar (an addon developed by Moz) or through Open Site Explorer (an SEO suite developed by Moz). Domain authority also known as DA consists more than 40 factors such as number of linking root domains, number of links pointing to a site, content updating frequency and number of different sites linking to your sites. A rule of thumb is, rather than considering domain authority as a measure to analyze your SEO efforts, consider it as a competition analysis metric, so you can compare your site’s DA score with other sites, the sites having higher score generally rank high in the Search engine results.
Page Authority
Page Authority is another important metric created by Moz. As the name suggest, page Authority (PA) is a score created by Moz that predicts how well a particular page will rank on Search Engine Results Page (SERP). Page Authority scores run from 1 to 100, with higher scores relating to a more prominent capacity to rank.
The main different between page authority and domain authority is that domain authority is a domain based metric while page authority is a page based metric. So if a site has 100 different pages, it will be having 100 different page authorities, while it will only be having a single domain authority for the entire domain.
Page Authority depends on information from the Mozscape index and incorporates link analysis, MozRank, MozTrust etc. Like Domain Authority, it utilizes a machine learning model to recognize the calculation that best associates with rankings.
Mostly, both of these metrics are updated by Moz after an interval of one month. So your current score will approximately be updated after a month from the last moz update. Here is the official link of Moz from where you can check when they updated the domain authority last time and plan your link building campaign accordingly.
When it start working?
The metric Domain Authority and Page Authority start to work from the moment the website goes live on internet. It starts with an initial score of 1 on the very first day and then it increases according to the inbound links. Like Domain Authority, Page Authority is also easier to grow from 20-30 as compared to 70-80.
Where you can analyze it?
There are numerous tools available on internet to analyze domain authority and page authority of a particular website. You can either check it through Moz official SEO Suite or through SEOmoz toolbar. SEOmoz toolbar is a browser based add-on which helps to check the domain and page authority in real-time. Apart from this, you can also use any third party tools such as Moonsy or SmallSEOTools Domain Authority checker to analyze it. One of the best thing about SmallSEOtools domain Authority checker is that you can check upto 50 websites in a single click. Hence it’s a really good tool for SEO professionals & Link Builders.