Does getting a placement in a high DA site matter if PA remains low?
-
I run a very small business in Australia, and was thrilled to create content which got picked up by a DA92 site in my industry. PA is at 1 as it's only been live for 2 weeks now, and I have a couple of questions that I couldn't find online:
-
If a huge site like the Wall Street Journal adds content all the time, the page gets buried in their history. Would the PA improve over time, or should I just expect it to remain at 1 or 1-10?
-
Is the boost to my SERP's negligable, is there a period where I need to wait to see the effect, or is there any effect whatsoever if the PA remains low?
Thanks so much in advance, I really appreciate any input.
Cheers,
Marcus -
-
thanks so much for your reply Brian that makes a lot of sense.
I'm now just waiting for another couple of links to get indexed, then hopefully I'll see some rewards for the work done!
Cheers,
Marcus
-
If that link comes from a Wall St. Journal Property that doesn't allow just anyone to create pages with followed links (i.e. blogspot), I would anticipate that link yielding terrific long term results for your site's page and domain authority. Most small businesses have a very hard time getting those types of links so you should be very proud.
At the same time though, when it comes to linkbuilding always remember to play the long game. Every once in awhile that unicorn link that makes an instant impact comes along but generally speaking that's a result of click through traffic as a result of people clicking on that link when the page goes live ... it sounds like that's NOT the case here if I understand your post correctly so I would just keep doing what you're doing that got you that link in the first place
Also, I'm sure you've already done this but it's always a good idea to share links about your business from other sites on your social media for the bragging rights and of course, it won't hurt the value of that link to have good social signals going to it.
-
Thanks for the reply Matt, that makes a lot of sense.
As a follow-up query, if it's picked up on a large site that generates daily content, should the PA not improve by much, will the link even matter? The content was to a Wall St Journal property, and as a result I doubt people will read it now that it's a couple of weeks old and newer content has gone up on their site. Originally I was thrilled, but I'm starting to doubt whether it will matter that much to my rankings, as it will continue to go deeper and deeper in to their history.
Cheers,
Marcus -
Sure! It's almost like it's my job. In general, your timeline is accurate. Campaigns—including crawl report, keyword rankings, etc.—update weekly.
-
I'm still learning about refresh rates & the inner workings of Moz - today I learned a bit more, thanks Matt.
-
Oh, and just to say: Congrats on your content getting picked up. That's pretty rad.
-
Hi Marcus!
What I'm getting from your question in that a high-authority site has a roughly two-week-old page featuring a piece of content of yours. Is that correct?
Generally, a PA or DA of 1 simply means that we don't yet have information on that URL. As I explained in my response to John, we gather that information through our crawl of the web as documented in our Mozscape index. That crawl takes ~1 month.
PA and DA are based on pretty much the same factors, and those factors are almost entirely based on the strength of the backlink profile. According to the Open Site Explorer home page, the last index was released March 2, and the next index is expected to be released March 30. That makes March 30 the earliest you can expect to see information about that page. It's quite possible that you still won't see it until the following update.
PA and DA are both based on pretty much the same factors, and those factors are based almost entirely on the strength of the backlink profile. The difference is that DA is based on the backlink profile for the entire domain, while PA is based on the backlink profile for just that page. PA can be raised by building links to the page. If it doesn't gain links, PA won't improve (though I'd expect it to me higher than 1 once it's been crawled and indexed).
Now, lastly, you ask about your boost in the SERPs. I assume you mean you're expecting a bump for your site, since the high-authority site links to you through the content it's picked up, yes? In that case, you may see some benefit on the SERPs well before the change is reflected in PA (Google crawls a lot faster than we do). The amount of a boost you get will depend on a lot, including your competitors' link profiles and whether the content that got picked up also appears on your site (if it does, I hope the high-authority site is pointing to the original content on your site with rel=canonical, or you could find yourself competing with them).
I really hope that makes sense. Let me know if you need more clarification, or if I'm just totally misunderstanding your question!
-
I just want to add a point of clarification to #1 there:
It could actually be several months before PA and DA update to reflect changes. This is because PA and DA are link metrics based on our Mozscape index (the index that also powers Open Site Explorer). Index update times vary, but it's fair to say they take an average of 4 weeks or so to compile. So, link metrics update approximately once per month.
But!
Say your site acquires a new backlink, which may have an affect on its authority metrics. If Mozscape is still in the process of crawling and indexing the web and hasn't yet crawled your site, then provided your site gets does get crawled you'll see the changes in the next index release.
If, however, Mozscape is still in the process of crawling and indexing the web and has already crawled your site, you won't see any update for 2 or more index cycles. This is because your site has already been crawled in that cycle and won't be recrawled until the index is released and we start on a new one.
You can see the date of the last release and the expected date of the next on the Open Site Explorer homepage, or here.
Does that make sense?
-
I'm fairly new, so take this with a grain of salt but:
-
I expect the PA might improve over time, although I can't be sure. Also remember that Moz doesn't update in realtime, so even if Google figures out what's going on and gives you credit, it might take a week or two to show up in Moz.
-
(I'm more confident on this answer) It'll take time. Nothing in SEO is instant, in my experience. Also, if the huge publication picked it up & linked to you, you'll probably get a bunch of other copy-cat links.
-
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
What's the best way of crawling my entire site to get a list of NoFollow links?
Hi all, hope somebody can help. I want to crawl my site to export an audit showing: All nofollow links (what links, from which pages) All external links broken down by follow/nofollow. I had thought Moz would do it, but that's not in Crawl info. So I thought Screaming Frog would do it, but unless I'm not looking in the right place, that only seems to provide this information if you manually click down each link and view "Inlinks" details. Surely this must be easy?! Hope someone can nudge me in the right direction... Thanks....
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rl_uk0 -
How to outrank a directory listing with high DA but low PA?
My site is at 4th place, 3 places above it is a gumtree (similar to yell, yelp) listing. How can you figure out how difficult it would be outrank those pages? I mean obviously the pages would have low PA and they are top based on the high DA of the site. This also seems to go back to keyword research and difficulty, when I'm doing keyword research and I see a wikipedia site in top 5 rank, or a yell.com or perhaps an article in forbes.com outranks your site. Typically the problem seems to be Google giving a lot of credit to these pages rankings based on the high DA rather than PA of the pages. How would you gauge the difficulty of that keyword then if the competition are pages with very high DA which is impossible to compete with but low PA? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | magusara2 -
Is this site worth subscribing to?
Hi everyone is, the below site worthwhile submitting to? I see one of our competitors is on here and the article they have published has in turn be picked up by other sites. Is the financial cost worth the back link reward? https://app.prweb.com/Main.aspx?Entity=Home
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Hardley10 -
How can i get high ranking on yahoo?
My search terms are highly visible on Google but is hardly visible on Yahoo. This has been the case for a few months. What can I do to boost my ranking on Yahoo? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | csknight0 -
Is this site legit?
http://www.gglpls.com/ is this site legit? Submit website to google + directory?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEODinosaur0 -
Our site has been penalized and it's proving to be very hard to get our rankings back...
So I have a question. We have used nearly every trick in the book to rank our site, including a ton of white hat stuff.... but then also a lot of black hat practices that resulted in us dropping in the rankings by about 30-40 positions. And getting back to where we were (top 10 for most keywords) is proving to be nearly impossible. We have a ton of great content coming off of the site and we actually offer a quality product. We follow most of the guidelines advocated here on SEOmoz. But the black hat stuff we did has really taken a toll. And it's gonna be pretty much impossible to go back in time and erase all of the Black Hat stuff we did. So what should we do? Should we design a completely new website with a new domain? What can be done to help?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LilyRay0 -
Purchased a high ranking domain and want to transfer my site to the new domain
I recently purchased a highly ranked domain. The link profile is very good and I don't want to lose to many links however I want to transfer my site to that domain. What is the best way of doing this without losing the current rank on search engines? Also how much does the transfer of registrar information impact my SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ydop0 -
Badges For a B2b site
love this seo tactic but it seems hard to get people to adopt it Has anyone seen a successful badge campaign for a b2b site? please provide examples if you can.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DavidKonigsberg0