- This topic is empty.
-
Posts
-
Any webmaster who has dealt with exchanging/buying/selling links is all to familiar with Google’s PageRank (PR). PR is the most common data point used to value a link today. I’m sure we have all dealt with the webmaster who has a PR5 website and won’t make an exchange with you unless you reciprocate with an equivalent PR page.
The question is…why is PR the only metric used by so many webmasters to value a page on the web? There are so many other valuable metrics; traffic, backlink count and actual rankings to name a few. The obvious answer is that we are lazy and PR is the quick and easy way to determine some semblance of value, no matter how flawed (or antiquated) PR really is.
So, last week Open Site Explorer was launched by SEOMoz, and along with this new SEO tool are some interesting metrics called Page Authority and Domain Authority. While these aren’t perfect metrics, they seem to provide more depth to them than simple PR, especially since OSE also shows you the links and domains linking into a website.
Here’s how they explain it:
Domain and Page Authority scores are both calculated using SEOmoz’s Ranking Models work. In essence, we take a lot of rankings data from the search engines (by running queries) and then try to build a predictive scoring system using our own on-page analyses and Linkscape link data to construct an algorithm that will effectively reproduce the search engines’ results. Our current accuracy hovers in the 70% range, but over time, we expect to improve.
Now that this metric is out there, will you be looking at Page Authority when exchanging/buying/selling a link?
IMO page authority doesn’t matter when selling links.. obv it needs to be considered when acquiring, but this should be part and parcel when doing your recon to see where you can get relevant, authority links from. Surley you have been considering page authority in the past when brokering links?
as for the Seomoz tool, it’s just a jumped up version of siteexplorer from what I could see, altho it does offer some added functionality/bells and whistles [siteexplorer closing soon, queue the seomoz guys entering the fray to make some $$$…]. One can probably write a few scripts to do the same job for free using the SE APIs.
Open Site Explorer is an expanded version of the LinkScape tool that SEOMoz launched last year. One of the features they added is the Page Authority metric, which is different from their mozRank and trustRank scores which were a little hard to understand. According to their documentation, the Page Authority metric is an entirely different calculation.
Thanks for the heads up on this new tool. I think that PR is very over rated. It’s now degenerated into a metric that is relatively useless. I understand for some, it’s the only metric to go by when judging the quality of the link, but I stopped looking at page rank some time ago.
I like the Page Authority idea a lot. SEO moz has some gret SEO minds over there.
Thanks for sharing!
I would use this for directional purposes only. Remember, this is an arbitrary number based on a seomoz algo.
Nice tool, interesting.
SeoMoz is much better than any other ranking…
I do think they have a good system, but their inventory of sites is much smaller and updated less often. I have a few good links that don’t show up on there at all.
From some research it also seems that it doesn’t have too much impact on rankings. I have seen similar sites, one that had high page & domain authority on OSE and the other which outranked it for every term. Unless the first guy had horrible on page it would seem OSE wasn’t a really good measure of what it took to rank, which quite frankly is all I am concerned with.
86/100 pr5
85/100 pr4
47/100 pr5
thats how some of mine ranked up.Obviously for link sales the 47/100 pr5 will get more than the pr4 85/100.Google has brainwashed us for years ,they send us 80%+ traffic so hard to change our ways now@Gregger 216667 wrote:
I do think they have a good system, but their inventory of sites is much smaller and updated less often. I have a few good links that don’t show up on there at all.
From some research it also seems that it doesn’t have too much impact on rankings. I have seen similar sites, one that had high page & domain authority on OSE and the other which outranked it for every term. Unless the first guy had horrible on page it would seem OSE wasn’t a really good measure of what it took to rank, which quite frankly is all I am concerned with.
That’s a difficult measurement since OSE is only attempting to score the strength of a page, which if all things are considered equal, then the higher score would outrank the lower score. However, not all things are equal, since the content on every page is unique, domains are unique and link profiles are also unique.
For example, 2 websites might have the same score, while one ranks top 10 for “online gambling” and the other doesn’t rank top 100 because they don’t target that keyword, or haven’t gotten many backlinks with that keyword. It would be nice if OSE gave an estimate on which keywords a site should be ranking best for. It seems like the data might be there to make that estimate since they know the anchor text distribution and have a score for each of those pages linking in.
@casinobonusguy 216682 wrote:
86/100 pr5
85/100 pr4
47/100 pr5
thats how some of mine ranked up.Obviously for link sales the 47/100 pr5 will get more than the pr4 85/100.Google has brainwashed us for years ,they send us 80%+ traffic so hard to change our ways nowBased on your knowledge of your own sites, would you say those scores are accurate for the strength you feel each of your sites has? (eg: traffic and rankings)
OSE Page authority is still a guess…they don’t program the serps, they don’t know how important each of the “200 factors google grades on”. Their programmers can guess just like we can guess. I give them an A for effort though.
Cache date should be very important in judging authority. Anything over 6 weeks old not very much authority even if it has pagerank.
@casinodave 216709 wrote:
OSE Page authority is still a guess…
Yes, everything SEO related online is a guess since Google doesn’t share their algorithm details, and for good reasons. The point is to find the best guess available as clearly PR is not all that helpful anymore.
