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Can we replace PR with OSE Page Authority?

webber286 asked 4 years ago
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?

16 Answers
pokerseo answered 4 years ago
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.

webber286 answered 4 years ago
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.

pokerseo answered 4 years ago
sure, but we can roughly gauge page authority via the serps (and using siteexplorer for BLs) no?

WagerX answered 4 years ago
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!

seodude answered 4 years ago
I would use this for directional purposes only. Remember, this is an arbitrary number based on a seomoz algo.

Dominique answered 4 years ago
Nice tool, interesting.

allfreechips answered 4 years ago
SeoMoz is much better than any other ranking…

AK answered 4 years ago
I agree Chips

Gregger answered 4 years ago
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.

casinobonusguy answered 4 years ago
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