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You could also use it in a situation where you're ranking highly for a term but it's not currently showing in Google Suggest.

Good point, I guess it's partly because it's an 'unknown' factor right now and I want to find out more about it. We rank better than a couple of competitors who have much better page and domain authority scores and I'm curious as to why that is. It seems like there is a big discrepancy between how SEOmoz views our site and how Google views it (search rankings + toolbar PR), and I'm wondering what's causing it.

We spend a lot of time on tools, content and website improvement, which definitely has a lot of customer benefits so it's worth doing it for that alone - customer satisfaction is our main focus. We have gained a lot of links and personal recommendations which are massively valuable in themselves, but domain authority hasn't increased at all. Thanks for your reply, always good to keep an eye on the bigger picture

We have gained quite a lot of good links to our core inner pages in the last year, including one from The Guardian. It seems strange that our domain authority hasn't even increased by 1 from that over the course of a year.

On the other hand, we have lots of pages so maybe we need to try and attract links to a greater number of them. Thanks for the idea!

We've jumped up in our rankings, page authority scores, and our toolbar PR over the past year, but our domain authority score remains the same as it was this time last year.

I have noticed that for most people's sites, domain authority is typically higher than page authority, and my suspicion is that our domain authority score staying static is capping our page authority potential to some degree. Our SEOmoz scores are quite low for our toolbar PR.

I've looked at the SEOmoz page relating to domain authority, and it rather vaguely says 'improve SEO generally across your site'.

Other than age, the only thing I can think of is that maybe we have backlinks ranging across too broad a spectrum of topics. Being a web hosting company, we get a lot of links from our customers' sites that aren't related to our industry.

Anyone got any specific advice? To provide some context, it's a PR7 website that's around a decade old with links in the hundred thousands. We score just 59 for domain authority.

Thanks in advance,

Jenni

This is interesting, because I assume this to be true and yet I've encountered the opposite. I used a simple 301 to direct an outdated page to a more relevant page on the same topic. Both pages were well-optimised, and the (slightly) newer page had more, higher-quality backlinks. I vanished from the SERPs for my keyword, and 3 months later hadn't returned - despite expecting Google to simply replace the listing for the old page with the new one. When I removed the 301, the original page appeared in the same position in the SERPs.

Because of this, I think it's best to be careful when it comes to 301s.

Casey gave a great answer, but just to add another point...

Even if they don't get public recognition in terms of appealing to customers and becoming mainstream, generic names like www.birthdaygifts.co have considerable value to domainers and affiliates, so they are definitely worth holding on to even if you don't develop them.

You could also use it in a situation where you're ranking highly for a term but it's not currently showing in Google Suggest.