When it comes to Page Rank and Domain Authority, do you know where you stand? How about your competitors? If you’re not sure what these are, then this post is for you. Let us help you learn how to understand and use these metrics like a pro.
Transcript
Hi. My name is Brynna. Today, I want to talk to you about page rank and domain authority. We’ll start off with page rank.
It was invented by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google, and uses a variety of different metrics, such as external backlinks, traffic, and a few other things to tell how well your page might rank in the search engines. It’s on a scale from 0 to 10, and as I said, it uses a lot of other things to measure. One way that you can use it is to see how your individual pages are ranking stacked up against each other. Because it functions on a purely page-by-page basis, your homepage is usually going to be the highest, but there are other pages on your site that can outrank your homepage.
Domain authority is next; it was developed by SEOmoz, the people over there, and they made their own algorithm to go with page rank. They use a variety of over 40 different factors in there to figure out the potential that your site has to establish authority, or the strength of your website over time. It’s on a scale of 0 to a 100. That actually is a logarithmic scale, so that means that it’s easier to go from perhaps a 10 to a 20, than it is to go from a 70 to an 80 because over time, you have to build up your authority. In the beginning, it’s fairly easy because you’re just getting established, but over time, it becomes more difficult. Unlike page rank, this actually functions over your entire website. If you have a homepage of a 48-domain authority, your entire site has the same domain authority, unless of course you have your blog on a separate page.
If you’re using sites like Blogspot or WordPress and you haven’t navigated the domain over, if it’s a website.blogspot or a website.wordpress, it’s actually going to throw your domain authority off because it’s using the Blogspot or WordPress to grab the domain authority. If you’re using, for example VerticalMeasures.blogspot, that’s going have a domain authority of 95, where it may not actually have deserved a 95 domain authority. It’s using the Blogspot, which is obviously very authoritative.
What are the ways we use domain authority and page rank? We use them to judge ourselves and our competitors. We can look and say, “I have higher domain authority. I must be doing something right over here, but my page rank is a little lower. Why is that?” It just gives us an idea of where we have the potential to be ranking.
The next thing we do at Vertical Measures is we use them as just two of the factors of why we might link-build on a page or link prospecting. If we’re looking at websites to go out and build things to, the ones with the higher metrics have the higher potential to rank, so we’re going to go ahead and contact those sites first. The other reason that we use this is to see how well a site is handling being ranked. If they have, for instance, a PR5 and a domain authority of a little bit lower, perhaps a 20, an 18; we know there might be something wrong with the site. PR is updated less frequently than domain authority because the people over at Google are focused more on their search engine algorithm, so they don’t update PR as often. If you see a site with a high PR and a low domain authority or vice versa, there might be something wrong with that site or they may have gotten a recent penalty.
These are just some things to keep in mind when you’re looking at page rank and domain authority. Thanks.
How have you use Domain Authority or PR for your own use?