DA vs PA vs DR: What's the Difference? (Explained Simply)

DA, PA and DR all get thrown around in the same sentence, all use a 1-100 (or similar) scale, and all claim to measure "authority" — which makes it easy to assume they're interchangeable. They're not. Here's exactly what separates them.

Domain Authority (DA) — the whole domain

DA scores an entire domain as a single unit. It rolls up every page's link signals into one number meant to represent the overall strength of the domain's backlink profile. When someone asks "what's your site's DA?", this is what they mean.

Page Authority (PA) — a single page

PA uses the same underlying methodology as DA but scopes it to one specific URL instead of the whole domain. This matters because authority isn't distributed evenly across a site: a homepage or a single viral article can have a much higher PA than an average interior page on the very same domain, even though they share the same DA.

A practical implication: when you're evaluating a guest-post or link placement, checking the page's PA — not just the domain's DA — tells you more about how much authority that specific link is likely to pass.

Domain Rating (DR) — Ahrefs' version of the same idea

DR, popularized by Ahrefs, is answering essentially the same question as DA — "how strong is this domain's backlink profile?" — but calculated from Ahrefs' own link index and formula rather than Moz's. Because the two companies crawl the web differently and weight signals differently, DA and DR for the same site are usually close but rarely identical.

Neither is "more correct" than the other — they're two independent estimates of a similar underlying concept, each useful as long as you're consistent about which one you track over time.

Quick comparison

• DA — domain-level, Moz's methodology, 1-100 scale.
• PA — page-level, Moz's methodology, 1-100 scale.
• DR — domain-level, Ahrefs' methodology, 0-100 scale.

Which one should you actually track?

If you only track one, track DA or DR at the domain level — it's the more stable, less noisy signal, and easiest to compare against competitors over time. Pull in PA specifically when you're vetting an individual page for a link placement, since that's the one scenario where page-level, not domain-level, authority is the more relevant number.

You can check all three at once — DA, PA and DR, plus Spam Score — with our free DA/PA checker, or run them side by side against competitors with our comparison tool.