Earlier I made a post about how trust & authority relate to your rankings. While I briefly touched on the subject of domain metrics, I didn't really delve much into it and that's what this post is going to be about.
Now, what exactly are domain metrics and do they have an impact on rankings?
Q.1 - They're numeric values given to domains / urls that are arrived to using elements of what Google looks at to rank websites to predict its search engine ranking performance.
Q.2 - No. Not directly, at least. Domain metrics can give you an estimate of how well your website might perform but they are not set in stone. With that said, let's dive right in.
Google PageRank
Although considered by many people as "dead", PageRank (PR) was the original gangster. And although Google doesn't publicly update this measurement, it is still use internally to measure and rank websites.
PR works on a scale from 0 to 10. The higher the value, the more perceived authority the website had and thus the higher you'd rank. Being a metric used internally at Google, it strongly correlated to website's rankings. Meaning - if you focused primarily on building up your PageRank, there was a pretty damn good chance that your website would place highly if you had other elements done correctly. Such as - keyword placement, on-site structure and social signals.
Other topics that I have covered on this blog.
So...how do you increase a website's PageRank?
It wasn't very hard to manipulate if you knew what you were doing. The thing is, if you tampered with your PR too much then your rankings would be off. Meaning, you could have PR of 6 and not even crack the top 100. Just because your website has a high PR doesn't mean that you're going to dominate the competition.
Increasing PageRank correctly, however, is another story.
Google places a lot of weight on backlinks, so then receiving inbound links from high PR websites was an easy way to skyrocket your rankings as well as your PR.
Consequently, SEO's quickly caught up to this and started building their own PR networks, now affectionately named - Private Blog Networks, and crushed search engine rankings.
Let me tell you this, PBN's work like magic. They are freaking awesome and are here to stay for a while as long as Google places a premium on links.
For non-SEO's, PR Networks are basically aged domains that have expired that you can purchase through auctions or backorders and what you then do is build 'private' websites that you can utilize to skyrocket your rankings.
Where do these websites come from?
Usually they might be local businesses that might've gone out of business but they still hold a lot of that link power. Most sites that link to them really don't go around looking for broken links on their site because it's very time consuming and broken links don't really have much effect on their rankings anyhow.
Google doesn't de-value these links either because there's so many links and websites out there on the web that go expired and are picked up again, and it would just not be beneficial to Google to start devaluing links on expired domains. Plus, it would cost them a lot of time, money and man-power.
As you can see, these elements all favor search engine marketers who are looking to build highly authoritative backlinks back to their site and dominate searches. Lately Google has been trying to crack down on them by de-indexing websites who are static, inactive, follow certain footprints, etc but a well-done blog network is very hard to pick-up.
Usually these domains have very good pre-existing metrics such as Domain Authority, Trust Flow, etc...that SEO's look at in order to get an idea of their link juice.
Domain & Page Authority
Perhaps the closest thing to PR, and the best predictor of rankings. They take into account much more factors than links and trust and for this reason are able to predict rankings with as much as 80% correlation.
Domain authority is a phrase coined by Moz and very recently have been picking up steam. Throughout the SEO world, many people are now looking at Domain Authority over any other metric when looking to buy domains or predict their own ranking potentials and / or keyword competitiveness.
Domain Authority takes into account factors such as internal linking structure, inbound links, quality of inbound links, website structure, referring domains, domain age, and much more.
The other side of the coin is Page Authority which is the authority of any given page on the website. This builds much quicker than Domain Authority but it is not as big of a factor of rankings as DA.
How then, do you increase DA & PA?
Here are some basic principles to go by:
- A proper linking structure.
- DA & PA build through internal links. Makes sense as so does PR. That means if you have a page such as "Tampa SEO Services" and you link to your "Home Page" then, naturally, your DA & PA both increase.
- Number of Pages.
- Highly authoritative websites have thousands of pages. Amazon, Facebook, Youtube and Twitter are prime examples. Appropriately enough - they all have 100 Domain Authority.
- Quality Inbound Links.
- Too many spammy links can kill your DA, but just one authoritative backlink can really skyrocket your metrics, as well as your rankings. There's a higher premium placed on QUALITY rather than QUANTITY, a complete turnaround from a couple of years back.
- Age of Domain.
- As your domain ages, its authority naturally increases as well. Although not a significant increase, it does play a huge factor in terms of rankings. A phenomenon referred to as "The Google Sandbox" is commonly used to describe websites which don't have much age, trust or authority being stopped by what I like to call a "trust ceiling" which means the site is not trusted enough to be put at the top of the search engines.
These are just some of the factors that influence Domain Authority and some ways in which you can manipulate it. Always remember that inflating your DA just to see an improvement in rankings can actually be rendered useless because it is not a direct indicator of SERP performance but if all other factors taken into account and a website is correctly set-up, then you should have a pretty good idea of how well it will do.
Next on the list is Majestic.
Trust Flow & Citation Flow
Majestic's metrics are unlike the others in that, they're not too preoccupied with predicting rankings, they're more focused on measuring the quality of incoming links as compared to the quantity of them.
These metrics are called trust flow & citation flow. We're going to primarily be focusing on trust flow on this article because it is the most important one, however, it should be noted that Citation flow does factor in the whole equation.
On the broad scheme of things, citation flow is geared towards capturing the "popularity" of the domain. Meaning how many times it's being linked to, whether as trust flow is more geared towards "quality" of the domain. For optimal results, search engine marketers should be heavily focused on increasing the trust to citation ration because that's the direction we're headed towards in the future.
Personally, I like to make sure that any domain I purchase or my own domains have a much higher trust flow than citation flow because this means that your website has much more authority inbound links.
Though Majestic isn't as transparent as Moz with their metric calculations, we can safely assume that Majestic's metrics tend to be an average rather than quantitative. That means that they round up all your incoming links and then make an average of all them together, while on the other hand, as Moz builds up over time.
However, I could be wrong.
So, how do you increase Trust Flow?
I think it's of some importance here to reiterate that TF & CF do not try to predict how well your website will perform like Moz does, but improving your metrics will have a positive correlation with your rankings.
Trust Flow is very easy to figure out. Want more trust? -> Build stronger links. Simple.
The problem is - HOW?!
There's a couple of ways you can go about this:
- Private Blog Networks - As we have covered before.
- Paid links - Donation pages usually have awesome metrics and are quick & easy ways to build authority links.
- Strengthen existing links - Although I don't advocate this method, you can easily strengthen your inbound links with automated tools. Web 2.0's & Social Properties can usually take abuse better and improve your metrics.
Anyways, we've covered before how to build strong links but these by far are the most effective methods. I try to use different methods and test. Test, test, test. Always test.
I've seen some people go around signing guest books and dropping comment links and have pretty good success with it despite Google's massive crack-down on these practices.
Fact of the matter is - you never know what's going to work until you test it out.
And last but not least, Ahrefs.
Ahrefs URL Rating & Domain Rating
Arguably the least talked about metrics in the SEO world, albeit relatively popular. Ahrefs has by far the largest index of the three, but they also take into account a lot more links with lesser quality than Moz & Majestic and because Google doesn't really factor in low-quality links, then Ahrefs' correlation may suffer.
However, for people who are very impatient such as myself, Ahrefs updates their API much faster than the others. Majestic takes around 5-7 days, Moz updates its monthly, and Ahrefs typically takes 3-4 days.
Important to note - the more authority your website has, the faster it is crawled by every single crawler on the web. Whether it's Google, Moz, Majestic or what-have-you.
So, how does Ahrefs work?
Much alike Majestic, they're primarily concerned towards backlinks exclusively. Their main objective is to provide its users with quantitative data regarding the link profiles.
Its metrics, I've found, don't have nearly as much correlation with Google in terms of rankings as Moz does. Neither does Majestic, as a matter of fact.
Usually, I use Ahrefs to see what links are coming up to my website on a weekly basis, and although their metrics are useful, they don't provide as much insight as Majestic might.
Not to take away from it though, because it has a much larger index, it might give you a little more information regarding your anchor text percentages as not to over-optimize and get slapped by Google.
Ahrefs' metrics are URL Rating & Domain Rating. URL Rating, much alike, Page Authority, is primarily used to calculate any given page or URL's power & authority. Domain Rating, well, you get the gist.
I'm not going to delve too much into how to increase your metrics here because by now you should have a pretty good idea of how to do it.
Quality > Quantity
Conclusion
When trying to determine how your website stacks up against your competition, I'd suggest taking a look at all 3 indexes.
Looking at not only their metrics, but also their inbound links, anchor text usage, their referring domains and seeking link opportunities such as guest books, blog comments, or donor pages.
Matching your competition link by link and then capitalizing on their on-page miscues is a very easy way to skyrocket your way past them and completely crush your competition.
As I've said before, that is a very crucial part of our strategy. I believe a huge part of success is seeing what's working, replicating what's producing results for other people, and then carefully studying their errors & miscues to capitilize on these opportunities.
These are the factors we should be focusing on rather than inflating one's metrics in order to overpower our competition. Work smart, not hard. Also remember that the biggest predictor of whether or not your website will perform in Google, is to search on Google itself. That's the best prophet out there.
Talk soon,
David Alvarez.
from Miami SEO - Alvarez Web Services http://ift.tt/1LfxX3w
via IFTTT
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