How PR flows

http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~chazelle/courses/BIB/pagerank.htm

After reading that, I'm correct in my assumption that when you see a page ranking for a competitive keyword that has zero links pointing to it that's really because the PR is flowing from internal links (which have external links pointing to them) more than "Domain authority"? Is DA actually a real google acknowledged thing or just a moz thing?

Yes that's right. Internal linking very important.

If you build links to homepage only and link from there to your sub-pages they will rank to some extent and that's why.

Really the web is not a series of websites according to google, it's just a series of pages.

DA is just Moz, but it's like a parallel to PR so they are trying to create their own PR metric based on the same metrics they think google are using for PR.

Keep in mind that Page Rank is slowly becoming smaller and smaller part of Google's all around algorithm - new signals like Penguin, Panda, and Hummingbird are more important now.

Just to add to what davids355 said, there is *some* domain authority. For instance, suppose no Wikipedia page links to some page about ACMEPhones (fictitious), but it gets indexed somehow (because Chrome tracks what people visit and phones it back to Google, for instance), that page WILL rank for ACMEPhones, with no links from anywhere in Wikipedia or outside pointing to it, just because the root domain is strong.

VijaySEO said:

Keep in mind that Page Rank is slowly becoming smaller and smaller part of Google's all around algorithm - new signals like Penguin, Panda, and Hummingbird are more important now.

Click to expand...

Pagerank as we know it is dead but using links to determine authority definitely isn't dead and that's really what we are talking about here.

bartosimpsonio said:

Just to add to what davids355 said, there is *some* domain authority. For instance, suppose no Wikipedia page links to some page about ACMEPhones (fictitious), but it gets indexed somehow (because Chrome tracks what people visit and phones it back to Google, for instance), that page WILL rank for ACMEPhones, with no links from anywhere in Wikipedia or outside pointing to it, just because the root domain is strong.

Click to expand...

Agree.

PageRank is still used by Google. It is how the search engine works, and probably always will be. Panda, Penguin and all the other updates modify the total "score" that a page is given.

Google used to publish the PageRank of the home page for any domain. Since most links point to the home page of any particular site, you could gauge relative strength of sites from this metric.

However, because all the updates modify the total score, PageRank by itself became a not very useful metric. So Google updated the published (public information) less often, and eventually stopped publishing it.

PageRank is not "dead". It is still used by Google. We, the public, are not told it.

DA (Domain Authority) is Moz's attempt at creating a metric similar to PageRank. However, Moz does not know how Google works, and does not have as much information as Google, so DA is a poor comparison (and one that can be more easily gamed). But broadly, DA attempts to be a proxy for PageRank.