Importance of Page Authority for Google ranking

[ldor]

Hi
One of my site's pages ranks # 2 in Google for a relatively high competition keyphrase. This is very good of course. What confuses me is the Page Authority. While the PA of my page, according to an seo tool site, is 23, the PA of the pages ranking # 1 and # 3 are 12 and 30 respectively. So it looks like there is no correlation between PA and page's position in Google SERPs. Of course, there is also on-site SEO but I don't see anything so special about these two pages, especially about # 1 page, that it should be at the top with such a low PA. I checked the results using desktop, so Core Web Vitals shouldn't have anything to do with this.
According to my old knowledge (I haven't been active in SEO for a few years), PA should be the most important factor. But it seems something has changed in these years.
Could somebody suggest what it can be?

[edited by: engine at 8:20 am (utc) on May 18, 2022]
[edit reason] Please see WebmasterWorld TOS and this forum Charter [/edit]

[not2easy]

It is because Google does not pay any attention to PA. PA (and DA) is a third party measurement that may or may not have any relation to Google ranking. See this from Mueller (2021): [webmasterworld.com...]

Not new, see this for 2015: [webmasterworld.com...]

[martinibuster]

On a related note, in addition to what's been noted about the irrelevance of PA and DA, links are not the deciding factor for whether something ranks at the top anymore.

Links have been getting pressured from two sides.

1. Since the Hummingbird update around 2013 the value of links has been steadily decreasing because of the increasing importance of relevance.

2. Google is using AI to identify manipulative links and prevent them from being influential. AI just got a boost recently with Chain of Thought Prompting, so that may play a role in the future, if not already.

Good luck!

Roger Montti

[RedBar]

@MB ... Interesting point 2, thanks.

[Brett_Tabke]

Lets also not forget the rise of E-A-T. That is imho, the new Page Rank. There are quite a few good articles on the web detailing what goes into the calculation. YMYL (Your Money or Your Life sectors appear to be most affected by EAT)