John Mueller from Google said on Twitter that Google does not have the concept of page authority. "We don't have a notion of page authority," John Mueller said. How does this differ from maybe site quality, well, that is a good question.
First, here is the context behind why John responded the way he did:
We don't have a notion of page authority.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) June 20, 2021
Just last week we covered John Mueller saying that a site does have an overall site level quality but here John is saying there is not authority notion on a page by page basis.
John said last week "there's some signals that we can't reliably collect on a per page basis where we do need to have a bit of a better understanding of the overall site. And quality kind of falls into that category." So here, John is also saying that Google cannot "reliably collect on a per page basis" signals like "quality." Which does back up here where he is saying Google doesn't "have a notion of page authority." But if you take all the pages of a site as a whole, it can figure out the quality, overall of a site. What about the authority? Is quality and authority associated? Probably on many levels.
It has been super hard to fully understand these topics, the messaging from Google around quality and authority and how Google determines these concepts on a page or site level has been somewhat wishy washy over the years.
But if you look at how various Googlers have answered these questions over the years, you may start to understand how this may work.
Google might not be able to understand the authority or quality of a single page, but if you can learn about the collection of pages based on numerous signals pointing to all those pages on the site, Google may be able to understand the overall quality and authority of a site, within its category. While Google might not be able to assign a specific authority to a specific URL, it may has a higher domain level authority (not Moz's DA) and then assign those weights to a URL before it is ranked. Again, the communication from Google around these topics have been super hard to understand and maybe because it has changed over the years or maybe because Google does not want us to know?
Forum discussion at Twitter.
