Search engine optimization metrics

A number of metrics are available to marketers interested in search engine optimization. Google, Moz, Majestic and Ahrefs all use their own crawled data to derive at a numeric conclusion on a website's organic search potential. Since these metrics can be manipulated, they can never be completely reliable for accurate and truthful results.

Google PageRank

Google PageRank (Google PR) is one of the methods Google uses to determine a page's relevance or importance. Important pages receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results. Google PageRank (PR) is a measure from 0 - 10. Google Pagerank is based on backlinks. PageRank works by counting the number and quality of links to a page to determine a rough estimate of how important the website is. The underlying assumption is that more important websites are likely to receive more links from other websites.^[1] However, Google claims there will be no more PageRank updates, rendering this metric as outdated.^[2] As of 15 April 2016 Google has officially removed the PR score from their Toolbar.^[3]

Alexa Traffic Rank

Alexa Traffic Rank is based on the amount of traffic recorded from users that have the Alexa toolbar installed over a period of three months. A site’s ranking is based on a combined measure of Unique Visitors and Pageviews. Unique Visitors are determined by the number of unique Alexa users who visit a site on a given day. Pageviews are the total number of Alexa user URL requests for a site.^[4]

Moz Domain Authority

Domain Authority (DA), a website metric developed by Moz, is a predictive metric to determine a website's traffic and organic search engine rankings. Domain Authority is based on different link metrics, such as number of linking root domains, number of total backlinks, and the distance of backlinks from the home page of websites.^[5]

Moz Page Authority

Compared to Domain Authority which determines the ranking strength of an entire domain or subdomain, Page Authority measures the strength of an individual page.^[6]

It's a score developed by Moz on a 100-point logarithmic scale. Unlike TrustFlow, domain authority does not account for spam.

Majestic Trust Flow

Trust Flow (TF) is a score based on quality, on a scale between 0-100. Majestic collated many trusted seed sites based on a manual review of the web. This process forms the foundation of Majestic Trust Flow. Sites closely linked to a trusted seed site can see higher scores, whereas sites that may have some questionable links would see a much lower score.

TF is a score from 0 to 100 that is based on how many links a domain gets from a set of trusted seed sites. Sites that have link either directly or indirectly from a set of sites that the Majestic team collected manually will have a high TF, while those that have poor quality back links will have a low TF. Due to the manual nature of the collection of original seed sites, TF can be tough to manipulate.

Topical Trust Flow (TTF) is a score based on page authority within a topical category on a scale between 0-100. Topical Trust Flow helps users find influencers for specific categories and helps users determine if a link is relevant.^[7][8]

Together the Citation Flow and Trust Flow form the Majestic Flow Metrics algorithm.^[9]

Majestic Citation Flow

Citation Flow is a score between 0-100 which helps to measure the link equity or "power" the website or link carries. Citation flow is used in conjunction with "Trust Flow". Together the Citation Flow and Trust Flow form the Majestic Flow Metrics algorithm.

Together the Citation Flow and Trust Flow form the Majestic Flow Metrics algorithm. TF divided by CF is the TF:CF Ratio or just the Flow Ratio.^[10]

Majestic Million List

Majestic Million is a ranking metric created by Majestic to rank every website in the world based on the number citations from other websites, based on quantity and quality of incoming links. The list ranks the top million websites, with first position being the strongest relative to all other websites.^[11]

Ahrefs URL Rating (AUR)

Ahrefs URL Rating, a logarithmic scale of 0 to 100 developed by Ahrefs, measures the impact of all backlinks which link to a given URL (or the webpage being qualified). In general, the more backlinks a given URL has itself - the higher AUR score it receives and more link juice it has in backlinking to others. But having one "fat" link can give more "juice" in UR than a hundred of "thin" backlinks.

The AUR score will take into account only links to the homepage itself, while the Ahrefs Domain Rating (ADR) is an average score taking into consideration all URLs (webpages) for the domain being qualified.^[12][13]

Ahrefs Domain Rating (ADR)

Ahrefs Domain Rating, a logarithmic scale of 0 to 100 developed by Ahrefs, is an averaged evaluation of all webpages (or URLs) of the domain being qualified.

The AUR score will take into account only links to the homepage itself, while the Ahrefs Domain Rating (ADR) is an average score taking into consideration all URLs (webpages) for the domain being qualified.^[14][15]

SEMRush Rank

SEMRush Rank is a rating of sites based on the number of visitors coming from the first 20 Google search results. SEMRush is a website or platform which tracks keyword rankings within search engines, providing webmasters information regarding their targeted keywords. SEMrush displays the keywords that a given website ranks for and the number of searches done for those keywords per month, making this platform the only one which is providing reverse-engineering type of tracking, and the only one of its kind in the world of search engine marketing.^[16][17]

Serpstat Visibility Rank

Measures how website's visibility has been changing over the last year and stands for visibility in top 100 Google results. Serpstat calculates this parameter according to the correlation between the number and popularity of the keywords the given domain ranks for in Google's top 100. Visibility is shown in the percentage to the maximum possible visibility based on ranks for all keywords in Serpstat's database.^[18][19]

References