You may have seen people talking about their DA (and sometimes their PA) and brands asking for bloggers with a PA/DA over a certain number, but it’s one of those things that all bloggers are assumed to know, and might feel silly for asking. Well, that’s what we’re here for – answering the questions that you think are too dumb to ask in public!
DA is Domain Authority and is another way to quantify the reach of your blog. PA is Page Authority and is a more narrow calculation of how well a specific page on your blog will do in Google search results.
Domain Authority is a method used to see how well a domain will rank in Google search results – the higher your DA, the better your blog will do in the average persons search.
The scale that DA and PA are calculated on goes from 1 to 100. The further up the scale you go, the slower your rank will increase – it is easier to improve your ranking from 20 to 30, than it is from 70 to 80
Both DA and PA are a ranking created by moz.com – it has no influence on Google, and is not used by all brands and PR people to judge whether it is worth working with your blog.
The average DA is about 30-40 for most blogs with their own domain, but you’ll see a skew in the DA for Blogspot and WordPress.com sites – the test blogs that we have on Blogspot and WordPress (both only have one post on there, saying “This is a test blog, go to bonjourblogger.com”) came out at 93/100 and 100/100 respectively! If a brand uses DA and PA to make a judgement on whether to work with you, then they should take this into consideration.
You can find out your DA and PA on opensiteexplorer.org – but don’t worry if your rank is quite low! According to the creators, it’s (purposefully) quite difficult to directly influence a change in ranking – just keep working on improving your blog posts (because as anyone will tell you, content is king)
This is really interesting – thanks for sharing!
Thats it really, I’m off to cyber stalk myself for a bit!
M x
Ahh, thanks. This makes sense now. I’ve been wandering what those meant for a while!
Does this mean that in some ways it’s beneficial to have a Blogspot subdomain? I’m not sure how all this stuff works. I’m interested in using my own domain name but I also like using the Blogspot one.
Technically, yes, the Blogspot domain is always going to have a higher DA than anything your own blog would have, but if you want brands, etc, to work with you, it’s not unusual to see them requesting own domain.