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- reliability of a site , domain authority , backlinks , Citation Flow , detox , Domain authority , Domain authority checker , Domain pagerank , domain popularity , Google PageRank , Google Toolbar , inbound links , outbound links , link popularity , Majestic SEO , improve Domain authority , Moz , backlink number , page rank , Pagerank ,PageRank Checker , penalization , Pre Post SEO , SEO Zoom , Trust Flow , Trustrank , Zoom Authority
We have been talking about PageRank since the dawn of time, or at least since we started dealing with positioning on Google . In recent years, however, something seemed to have changed, with the introduction of other metrics and new terms, such as domain authority or website trustrank. PageRank seemed by now an outdated concept, definitively put in the background, but is it really so or is it still important for those involved in SEO.
Topics index
- What is Google PageRank
- In the beginning it was link popularity: differences with PageRank
- The Google Toolbar: what happened to it?
- PageRank Checker: how PageRank is measured
- The “evolution of PageRank”: the Trustrank
- Domain authority checker: what are the most important metrics today
- PageRank today
What is Google PageRank
PageRank, abbreviated to PR, is a score ranging from 1 to 10 that Google attributes to a site or web page, based on its importance. Once the PageRank of a site was shown publicly, thanks to the Google Toolbar, a colored bar that identified the value attributed to a site by Google, with a numerical score. Then, over the years, the Google Toolbar, as we will see later, was eliminated. However, this does not mean that PageRank is no longer considered an element of value, even today, for Google.
Usually, PageRank refers to the quantity of incoming links, and their quality, but not only that. Google, to calculate the PageRank of a website, takes into consideration the quantity and quality of incoming links, the number of outgoing links on each linked page and the PageRank of each linked page.
When a page receives many authoritative and relevant inbound links it is considered a trustworthy page. Of course, not all inbound links are created equal. If the link comes from a page with a high PR it is obviously worth more than the one coming from one with a lower PR. When a website is put online it has no PageRank. Then, after a few months, if proper positioning work is done, it can increase its PR.
Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text matching techniques to find pages that are important and relevant to your search
By following a good strategy, with original and interesting content, which can attract external links, the PageRank of a site can improve. PageRank is important of course, as are all the metrics and algorithms in the Google world that can give your website greater authority, but it doesn’t have to become an obsession. In fact, precisely because of this obsession on the part of SEOs in the past years, Google has decided to make the value attributed to the various sites invisible, through the Google Toolbar. Google has thus stated that PageRank is important but not the only factor in how pages are ranked. This is good because too many people have been fixated on PageRank scores for too long.
In fact, even more important than PageRank is gaining the trust of potential customers . If your site generates traffic and converts, PageRank will no longer be your problem.
In the beginning it was link popularity: differences with PageRank
There is also another concept that refers to inbound links to our site, and that is link popularity.
Link popularity refers to the number of backlinks (inbound links) pointing to a particular website. Unlike domain popularity , each backlink is counted separately. For example, if 5 links to site B start from site A, a total of 5 backlinks will be counted. Link popularity was important for search engines at the beginning but later importance was given to domain popularity which, in addition to quantity, provides information on the quality of backlinks . For this reason it is important to get as many high-quality backlinks as possible, as everyone who clicks on a backlink will be directed to your website.
Quality and relevance are therefore the 2 concepts that must be the basis of an offsite SEO strategy to avoid penalties and subsequent Detox.
In the past, therefore, the SEO specialist who wanted to position himself for a certain keyword had to make sure that that term was used as an anchor (anchor text), if he wanted to increase its positioning, placing as many links as possible with matching anchors exact, from high PageRank pages. Over time, however, Google began to consider it as a manipulation giving link popularity gradually less and less value.
In fact, link popularity considers the popularity of a single page, while PageRank evaluates the authority given by the links to our site, which must be of value to increase the score attributed by Google. PageRank is therefore a sort of “evolution” of link popularity, because it is not limited to a simple count of the incoming links to a website for a given keyword, but evaluates the quality and relevance of these links as very important. .
The Google Toolbar: what happened to it?
Today Google does not let the actual PageRank value of a page leak out, but until 2016, there was a tool that could offer a rough estimate of this parameter: the Google Toolbar. Then, from that year on it disappeared and is no longer shown on any site today.
This indicator showed the PageRank value for the page you were visiting, and it could fluctuate between zero and ten. Where zero usually identified the sites on which no positioning work had been done, with incoming links, while ten those that Google rated as excellent sites, worthy of reliability. This value was dictated by a logarithm, which made it extremely difficult to switch from a PR6 to a PR7, rather than a PR2 to a PR3.
The Google Toolbar was then eliminated because many SEOs gave value to it instead of creating quality content that could make the user experience better and better, an objective that, especially in recent years, has become of primary importance for the search engine. Research.
PageRank Checker: how PageRank is measured
A few years ago an increase in the PageRank score, highlighted by the Google bar, was proof that an SEO strategy was paying off. However, the update of the PageRank values has not been made visible by Google for several years. You could once have used one of the many PageRank checkers, but this is no longer the case. There is no longer an official tool , but instead there are various metrics , as we will see shortly.
The evolution of PageRank ”: the Trustrank
TrustRank helps Google and other search engines fight spam phenomena related to mere link growth without increasing the quality of a website.
TrustRank measures so-called ” confidence signals “. In fact, the algorithm is composed of over 200 metrics that are used to position the results in the SERP.
By simplifying , Google promotes the websites it trusts and measures “trust” in their algorithm with the TrustRank. This therefore explains why a newly registered domain, lasting a few months, is more complex to position than a site with a greater seniority.
However, this does not mean that PageRank is no longer taken into account. In fact, even if it is no longer visible, it is still a metric considered by Google, albeit with some differences compared to the past. Today we mainly talk about TrustRank, whose goal is to rank a web page. To improve the authority of the site, it is not necessary to receive many links , but it is necessary to receive links from authoritative and relevant sites (in topic with the topics covered by our site).
If you are looking for a useful tool to calculate the authority of a domain, and compare multiple domains with each other, I recommend Pre post SEO . It is a very useful free tool for those involved in SEO.
Domain authority checker: what are the most important metrics today
Among the various tools made available by Pre Post SEO you will find https://www.prepostseo.com/domain-authority-checker which helps to measure the Domain Authority (DA) of a domain, i.e. a ranking score developed by Moz which provides the likelihood that a website will rank on search engine results pages (SERPs).
As we said: there are some differences compared to the past. We can no longer speak exclusively of PageRank, because the metrics to measure the authority of a site for Google are different. Now we no longer use a PageRank Checker, as it did in the past, to understand how the positioning of a website is behaving, but instead we refer to the “Domain Authority Checker”, which identify the authority of a domain in based on other metrics. Let’s see together what they are.
Domain Authority (DA)
One of the metrics par excellence, just mentioned is the Moz Explorer Domain Authority. This is a search engine ranking score developed by Moz, which works on the probability that a website has to rank in the first pages of the results. The Domain Authority assigns a domain authority score from 1 to 100, with higher scores corresponding to greater classification ability. The metric offers results both on the domain and on the individual pages, in the latter case we speak of Page Authority (PA); this explains why in the suggested tool you find written DA PA Checker.
Zoom Authority (ZA)
One of the most important metrics today is the Zoom Authority. SEO Zoom is in fact one of the most famous tools for monitoring the positioning of awebsite so, consequently, the ZA has become the most used metric for evaluating sites and links in Italy.
The Zoom Authority indicates the performance of a website in Google searches and is calculated on the data of all the domains existing in the database, therefore it represents a sort of classification of the domain within the web.
The difference with the other metrics is that the Zoom Authority does not take traffic volume or backlinks into account. In fact, many times it has been seen that the number or quality of a backlink was then betrayed by the fact that a website was not positioned with any important keyword, nor did it get organic traffic. The Zoom Authority does not take into account backlinks, because only Google has the information necessary to understand how much they really weigh on the authority of a website. The Zoom Authority in fact starts from the observation of the SERPs and from the satisfaction shown by Google towards the site. In this way, every time Google changes its algorithm, the ZA will adapt to the new one, without “falsifying” any data.
The Zoom Authority, on the other hand, takes into consideration the trust, that is the trust that Google shows for a specific website, the stability, or how much the website under consideration is able to maintain its positioning, and the opportunity, or the possibility that a particular website has to grow on search engines.
The stability of the organic positioning of a website refers to the many keywords positioned on the first page. Obviously this data will take into account any fluctuations. This means that if any keywords were to lose rank, but without completely collapsing the work done, it would still be considered a stable website. Conversely, a website with a lot of traffic, but only a few keywords positioned on the first page of Google, will not be considered stable.
The Zoom Authority ranges from zero to one hundred, and most websites that perform poorly on search engines have low scores. A value higher than 40 is, in my opinion, significant for a good “authority” score according to this metric.
Trust Flowe Citation Flow
All SEOs have tools they are “most fond of”; in my case Majestic SEO is my must have that never fails in the analysis phase.
Google, as explained, gives enormous importance to metrics such as the domain authority ( Domain Authority), however, by no longer providing “stable” values, it becomes relevant to cross data from multiple tools and among these I also suggest Majestic SEO and its 2 metrics Trust Flow and Citation Flow. With Trust Flow or Citation Flow, it’s easier to rank a website based on its quality, authority or trust. Let’s see what the difference is between Citation Flow and Trust Flow and how they interact.
Trust Flow is a metric registered by Majestic that analyzes the reliability of a site by measuring its quality . Quality is the essential datum of this metric. If a link pointing to your website is authoritative and qualitative, your Trust Flow will increase.
Citation Flow is also a Majestic SEO recorded metric that refers to the popularity of a link on a site regardless of the quality of those links . A website with many links pointing to it will be influential and receive a good Citation Flow.
From direct experience, if the Trust Flow increases, the Citation Flow should also increase, but the converse is not true: if the Citation Flow increases, there is no evidence that the Trust Flow will also increase. The key aspect is always the same, avoid low quality inbound links to the site . If you notice that some inexperienced SEO has made a manipulation of your backlink profile, I remind you of this Google Disavow tool to communicate that you distance yourself from spammy links that could negatively impact the trust that Google could place in your domain. Here a useful insight
Regarding Trust Flow and Citation Flow I would like to say that a good Trust Flow (> 25) is more difficult to obtain than a Citation Flow which will always be higher than the Trust Flow. Furthermore, even if you are developing a Digital PR strategy for creating quality links, always evaluate the authoritativeness of the source domain; in fact there is a correlation between a site that has a high Trust flow (meaning it has many qualitative backlinks) and the organic traffic that is generated.
DA, ZA, Trust Flow are valid external metrics but to be analyzed carefully; there are a few others. Domain authority is calculated by evaluating multiple factors, but it is not a metric used by Google to determine search rankings and has no effect on SERPs. The Domain Authority’s calculation correlates data and rankings across thousands of actual search results. For this reason, domain authority is difficult to influence directly. It is in fact an aggregate of metrics that aims to predict the competitiveness of a particular site in Google search results . Since Google takes many factors into account, a metric trying to calculate it must incorporate several.
So, if you want to improve the authority of your domain you will have to improve your overall SEO, paying particular attention to the incoming links, which must come from authoritative pages. The authority can then change, increasing or decreasing, based on the growth and authority of your links.
PageRank today
Just because there is no longer the Google Toolbar that makes the PageRank score of a web page visible to everyone does not mean that this metric is not yet used or considered important by Google. The question many of us are asking is: is PageRank still important today? Yes it is. But it has also become a more complex metric. In fact, it is influenced by many different factors, both structural and linguistic, within the page. In addition, it also evaluates user behavior: interests, approval rating and the number of times a link has been clicked, just to name a few.
Another important factor, as far as Google PageRank is concerned, is the quantity of links on the external page that links to our site. The more they are, the less contribution you will make to our site, in terms of authority. In addition, the topics covered by the external page are also important, compared to that of our site. If the topic is irrelevant to what we are dealing with, Google will consider the link of little relevance. Today the importance of PageRank has certainly decreased and other metrics have found space, as we have seen. PageRank today is only one of the many factors considered by Google, and it is not necessarily true that a good PageRank is synonymous with good ranking. Despite this, it still plays a role for Google in determining which results to show in the SERPs.
Improving the PageRank of a website, as well as the authority of a domain, is certainly one of the objectives of my professional SEO services. SEO Leader, follows companies and professionals to improve their visibility on search engines, will help you improve the authority and positioning of your website on Google. For a free quote, contact me.
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