The metrics

The metrics

Metrics have been used in SEO for over a decade, from when link sellers would survive by toolbar PageRank. Since that time, different software has tried to emulate what search engines might think about a URL or domain with a scoring system.

The remarkable thing concerning metrics is that they give a common goal ground between SEO practitioners, link buyers, and sellers, and clients.

• The metrics give a score from which you can measure SEO efforts on the scale.
• They assist you quickly recognize low quality.
• They save your hours of research by giving you a single number to evaluate.

There is no perfect way. They should ever take with a pinch of salt, and will not top human research and human gut feeling of a site.

Here are the most popular metrics:

Ahrefs Domain Rating (DR)

DR is a proprietary Ahrefs’ metric that displays the power of a target site’s total backlink profile. DR is related on a logarithmic scale from 0 to 100, with the latter being the strongest.

DR and Ahrefs rank are connected, and they are almost the same. Ahrefs rank orders all websites in the data by their raw DR principles. So you can think of AR like a granular DR.

Meaning imgur.com, ted.com, and hp.com all have the same DR of 91. But their backlink profiles are not the same, and there should be the strongest one and the weakest one among them.

With Ahrefs rank, you can’t see gaps between websites’ backlink profiles. Meaning the difference between the backlink profile of imgur.com and ted.com might be more significant than between ted.com and hp.com, but you can’t see that with Ahrefs rank.

Calculation of DR

Calculation of a given website DR is done as follows:

• Look at how much unique domain has at least one do-follow link to the target website.
• Take into consideration the DR values of those linking domains.
• Take into consideration how many unique domains each of those website link to. Apply some math and coding to calculate raw DR score
• Plot the score on a 0-100 scale

How to use DR.

Use DR as a ballpark fast measurement of the power of a website. The broader analysis will show more accurate truth, but when analyzing at scale, this can come in handy.

URL rating (UR)

UR displays the strength of a target page’s backlink profile on a logarithmic scale 0 to 100, with the latter being the strongest. Internal and external links are considered when calculating this metric. UR has a clear positive correlation with Google rankings, which means high UR pages tend to rank higher in organic search results.

If you have the knowledge concerning Google’s page rank formula, it’s easy for you to understand Ahrefs UR. Because the same basic PageRank principle is used to calculate UR. UR is near the perfect way to gauge the link admiration of a page, which is likely the cause it correlates so well with Google rankings.

How to measure UR

UR juice is passed through; do follow the link on every page equally. For instance, if a specific page has a UR of 100, it will give a part of its UR, equally between every other URL it links to from that page.

Use of UR.

It’s used to assess the authority of a page within site. Compare the UR to other pages on a similar place, rather than pages on different websites.

Referring domain

Also known as the Ref domain is the area from which you get backlinks. The backlink is essentially a website page that links back to your publisher’s website. Affiliates are continually looking to improve backlinks to their site to enhance search engine visibility. Referring domain figure is far more important than backlinks.

Getting several backlinks from the same domain doesn’t help publishers to change their page rankings.

Search engines continue to penalize websites that use shady tactics to increase backlinks. To strengthen page ranks of a publisher website, you require to maintain a high ratio of referring domain to backlinks.

Moz DA

DA is a search engine ranking score advanced by Moz that predicts how well a website will rank on search engine result pages. DA score ranges from 1 to 100, with higher scores corresponding to a more exceptional ability to list.

DA is calculated by evaluating several factors, including linking root domains and the number of total links, into a single DA score. The score can be in use whenever you want to compare websites or tracking the ranking strength of a website over time.

Measuring DA.

DA uses both the quality and quantity of linking sites to a given domain to score authority.

You can check DA using Moz’s link explorer, the MozBar, or in the SERP Analysis section of keyword explorer. Domain authority metrics are also included in all Moz Pro campaigns, as well as the Moz API.

Moz PA

PA is the same as DA, but it’s used to measure the authority of a single page. Moz PA has a scale that ranges from 0 to 100. Every new page starts with a score of 1. Then they increase as the time goes according to how they are liked on an external basis and within your site hierarchy.

How to measure PA: It uses the quantity and quality of internal pages and external linking sites to a given page to score the authority.

Use of PA

PA is used as a quick approximation of the authority of a page within the site. Make a comparison of the PA to other pages in the same place, instead of pages on different websites.

Majestic TF

TF, which stands for trust flow: It’s the number that reflects the quality of the websites linking to the site measuring the trustworthiness of a page.

How to measure TF

Majestic crowdsourced a manual review of the website and collated a set of trusted seed sites. How to separate a given URL is from this set of seed sites determines the TF.

Use of TF.

It can be useful when quickly determining how close a website is to trusted seed sites on the web.

Majestic CF

CF stands for citation flow. Reflects the amount of link juice that the site has and can pass onto another site through links. It’s a score of how many links exist to a given URL.

How to measure CF

It’s measured by the number of links to a given URL. Majestic states that not all links are devised the same; the basic is the more links a URL has, the higher the CF.

Use of CF.

It may be useful when quickly determining how prolific a URL is in terms of the number of links. TF and CF are used to measure the impact of a link from the website, as well as the likelihood of a particular website ranking well for the exact keyword.

Topical trust flow

Topical trust flow is how authoritative and trustworthy a domain is within its niche, and what the topic of the content is about. The content that links to a page helps determine its topical trust flow, so the more referring domains, the more accurate thematic trust flow is.

Ways to use topical trust flow to get the most out of your campaigns:

• Get twitter profiles of industry influencers and easily spot fakes.
• Make sure you are more in conversions on the google display network and Facebook Ads.
• Be sure that your content marketing strategy is reaching and resonating with the right audience.
• Spend more time when speaking and attending conferences.
• Theme your site to become the topical authority in your niche.

How to measure topical trust flow

Topical trust flow ranges between 0 and 100 for several categories. The higher the score in a particular group, the more links from within that category are going to the URL.

Uses of topical trust flow

It can be used to control the topical relevance of links tipping to a given URL. This can be used to see how effective a specified URL will be in a given category for links or traffic.

Trust ratio

It’s the trust flow. The trust flow ratio is won by dividing the trust flow by citation flow. TF/CF=trust ratio. The ultimate score is majestic would be a TF100 and a CF 100. Therefore, the best possible score for the trust ratio is 1. TF100 / CF100 = Trust ratio 1= great score.

How to measure trust ratio

The nearer the trust ratio to 1, the better. If your domain has a trust flow ratio of 1.3, it means that your area has trustworthy links, but those links aren’t taking in much juice. It’s because the sites your links are on don’t have many inbound links either.

If your domain has a trust ratio of 0.7, it means that your area has excellent link juice, but the sources of your inbound links may be questionable. It shows that the sites your links come from also have a lot of incoming links, but also indicates that their inbound links aren’t that trustworthy either.

Use of trust ratio

The best score for the trust ratio is 1, but the rule of thumb for an acceptable ratio score is between 0.6 and 1.4. Be aware of this when prospecting for links from certain domains or URLs.

Links metric conclusion

DA has been the most longstanding metric and used by many SEOs and agencies reliably. It’s a useful metric you can use if you are prospecting domains at scale.

If the in-depth analysis is taken into URLs and domains, Majestic’s trust ratio is a pretty reliable way of understanding a URL’s authority.

Traffic SEO metric

Traffic metrics are used to guesstimate how much traffic a website gets by using complex formulas based on keyword volumes and ranking positions. The popular tools that utilize traffic metrics are Ahrefs and SEMrush.

Ahrefs traffic

Ahrefs has an extensive keyword database of 474 million keywords in its site explorer and uses clickstream data combined with a google keyword tool to predict volume and organic SERP CTR.

The exciting thing about Ahrefs is that it uses clickstream data for each keyword to calculate CTR. There are numerous nuances and industries where CTR is higher or lower than the average, and Ahrefs tries to factor this accurately to give a picture of how much traffic a website receives.

Google analytics comparison

The data for a small affiliate site is compared against the actual analytics data, to examine the accuracy. This holds no bearing on the accuracy of the tool as a whole dataset would have to be significantly larger than one site.

SEMrush Traffic

SEMrush has a more substantial amount of keywords in its Domain analytics, although a little lower than Ahrefs, it’s comparable. SEMrush has 340m desktop keywords and 80m mobile keywords.

SEMrush claims to use third-party sources and clickstream data for keyword volumes, it’s not clear if they consider CTR for individual keywords or sector when determining organic traffic levels.

Traffic metrics conclusion

Between Ahrefs and SEMrush primary tools, choose Ahrefs because it’s more accurate, but also Ahrefs seems to be in for more research, whether it’s auditing keyword research or content analysis.

Guesstimated should be taken with a pinch of salt. They will never give an entire and accurate picture but can be used to compare sites to others or provide a very rough estimate of how much search exposure a website has.

The problem with traffic metrics

A lot of the bloggers, particularly outside of the tech industries, are not focused on SEO. Instead, they are more focused on social or direct visitors. They don’t bother to write blog posts to increase keyword traffic and therefore don’t optimize their site accordingly.

Because of low traffic guesstimation, a blog appears less authoritative. That why traffic estimation is not given much weight when prospecting for outreach, especially in the lower DA tiers.

The traffic can also work against blogs or website in more obscure niches where the volume of the keyword are simply lower or not in the tool’s database yet. A less popular topic doesn’t mean a less powerful blog to prospect from

.

Don’t look at guesstimated traffic as a tool to make big decisions on opportunities or evaluation. Use it as a soft metric to see if anything is majorly wrong or to get a rough approximation of where the site sits in terms of organic exposure.

Alexa

Alexa rank is an international ranking system that ranks millions of websites as per the popularity. It’s measured by looking at the estimated average daily unique visitors and number of page views for a given site over the past three months. The lower your Alexa rank, the more liked the site is. The lower the Alexa rank, the better the traffic is.

If you want to donate data to the rank, you need to download and install the Alexa toolbar. This will show the Alexa rank of the visited site. Besides, it will send traffic data to a central server, recording your IP address and the URL you are visiting.

Accuracy of Alexa ranking

Alexa’s rank can be used to compare one website’s performance against another. Alexa’s statistics are not the most accurate. Some people have compared Alexa and google analytic, concluding that Alexa is not valid. This could be because Alexa coverage is not as extensive as that of Google. Because of this coverage, use Alexa.

Manipulation of Alexa rank

As per the search engine journal, it’s easy to manipulate your website’s Alexa rank. You can do it by creating a JavaScript function to open an array of page addresses from your website, and you can artificially increase your Alexa rank. The aim is to get a separate window, thus increasing page views. This artificial rank does not last for long.

Pros of Alexa rank:

• If your site generates money through advertising, a high Alexa rank lets you charge high for advertising.
• You can get a fast traffic estimate of your competitors’ websites, which you can then compare against your own.
• There potential to attract higher quality guest writers’ anting to contribute articles to more top-ranked sites.
• Insights into the show of your website, which could be necessary for assisting with your other SEO.
• Data is only limited to users who have the toolbar installed.
• It’s easily manipulated, thus making the ranking unreliable.
• Subdomains and subpages are not ranked separately. So there could be some inaccuracies.

Tips to improve your Alexa rank

• You can use the fastest way to improve Alexa’s rank without manipulating it.
• Optimize your metadata
• Write content that people want to read
• Frequent update of your website
• Share your content on social media
• Increase web traffic

Similarweb

Similarweb is a drive that estimates the total amount of different traffic website gets. It lets you see competitors’ top traffic sources.

What makes similar web useful

• Similarweb is not 100% accurate, but it gives you the ability to see your competitors’ traffic sources.
• It’s a faster way to see who the most significant players in your space are and to get a sense of their respective sizes.
• You can use the similar web to see more granular details.
• If you upgrade to similar web pro, you get access to a host of features like device distribution, audience info, and traffic share from various social media section networks.

Key features

Traffic overview

Even if the traffic overview is the only thing similar web offered, it still is worth using it.

Total visits

The entire visit graph lets you see roughly how much traffic a given site has gotten over the past month. And a trend line of that site’s traffic over the past six months.

Engagement metrics

You can see an engagement metric like average visit duration, age views, and bounce rate.

Traffic source

Traffic sources show the breakdown of what percentage of a site’s traffic comes from each of these channels: direct, referrals, search, social, email, and display advertising. This is essential information you can use to help determine where you should focus your content marketing efforts.

Audience interest

Similarweb audience data focuses on what the site’s visitors do outside of that site itself. You can see the categories of benefits they have based on their activity outside the web. For an instant, the top class it shows for backlinko’s audience is online marketing, followed by computers, electronics, and technology.

Also visited websites

It gives the idea of other sites that your audience likes to check.

Word cloud

The section includes a word cloud of topics that similar web thinks are the most relevant to the site’s visitors.

Link metrics: why they are only indicators

Several different metrics aim to signify the relative strength of a page or domain, particularly concerning whether that page or area is good or bad.

These metrics are not the same replicas of how Google determines the strength of a page or the power that a link will pass on. They point to mimic this part of Google’s algorithms, as per the information and understanding each company has. As they are not 100% accurate replica, the score doesn’t reflect the strength or trustworthiness of a page or domain with 100% accuracy either.

A site is not weak because it has low DA. A website isn’t untrustworthy only because it has low TF. A page isn’t vulnerable only because it has little PA. The score indicates the likely power or trustworthiness.

If used as a gauge to refine a huge data set, these metrics can be astonishingly useful. For an instant, if you are analyzing a link profile with over 10000 linking domains and you want to quickly see what the most durable referring domains as per DA, DR, or CF will make your task a lot uncomplicated. This isn’t a task you can realistically do without link metrics.

These metrics do not consider relevance, which is hugely important. Google may well view a link from an ultra-relevant page with a PA of 20/100 at being better than one from a non-relevant page that has a PA of 30/100.

These metrics can provide:

• The position of the link on the page.
• The anchor text used.
• What the linking page is about.
• What the domain is linked to is about.
• Whether the link is no flow or not.

If used without any other indicator to showcase the value of an SEO offering, or to vilify a link profile, it will often mislead because these indicators cannot show the full picture by themselves.

What the difference between the metrics

The metrics have quite a similar purpose, which is to determine the strength of a page. The differences are in how they determine that strength.

Each of the companies has their data set and determining factors which are combined to decide the score of each domain or individual page.

Which link metric is the most reliable

They are all reliable since they fulfill their purposes: to measure, to predict strength. Studies have proved that these metrics often correlate with where pages are ranked in the SERPs, which means they can be useful to get a quick and loose interpretation of the likely strength or trustworthiness of a page.

It’s hard to say which is the most reliable. It’s a matter of personal preference. A combination can often be beneficial. One page may have an incredibly high PA from Moz but a reasonably low CF from majestic. This should make you think more about the indicated strength of the page.

The danger is when you rely too heavily on them. Not because they are a load of rubbish, but because they are not supposed to be entirely relied upon. They are only indicators.

Metrics are crucial because they let us quantify our outcome. However, not all parameters are essential, and some might be useful but are difficult to interpret.

A pervasive situation where marketers believe that they are doing a great job based on metrics they track when, in reality, they are not producing as expected.

Metrics suggest that you should change your marketing tactics and strategies. But you might be misinterpreting the meaning of those metrics, and after making the changes, you realize your work is less effective.