Tag: seo metrics

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Search Engine Optimization

What Majestic Citation Flow Means

Majestic Citation Flow is a trademark of Majestic. Majestic Citation Flow is a score between 0-100 which helps to measure the link equity or “power” the website or link carries. Majestic Citation flow is used in conjunction with “Trust Flow”. Together the Citation Flow and Trust Flow form the Majestic Flow Metric algorithm.

Majestic Citation Flow represents an evolutionary leap from our old metric – ACRank – and predicts how influential a URL might be based on how many sites link to it. Links are now not all created with equal weight – and because a strong link will have a relatively stronger influence on URLs, Majestic itation Flow is based on stronger, iterative matematical logic than the old metric of ACRank.

4 Ways to Boost Your Majestic Citation Flow (and SEO)

  1. Connect with influencers. Connecting with influencers is important when building authoritative backlinks.
  2. Guest post on high-quality sites.
  3. Link internally.
  4. Continually audit backlinks.

Before talking about how to find the trust ratio of a site, you must first understand exactly how Citation Flow and Trust Flow work. Dixon’s article on Flow Metrics explains this terminology. But the main thing to remember is that Citation Flow is link juice and the Trust Flow is how close those links are to trustworthy, authoritative sources.

To get the Trust Flow you simply do the following calculation: Trust Flow / Citation Flow = Trust Ratio

The basics behind why the trust ratio works is because, if the Majestic Citation Flow is high and the Trust Flow is low, this means that the website being checked has a lot of link equity (or “juice”), but barely any trust from those links. This usually indicates that the site has gained those links from “spammy” areas of the web as they are not close to authoritative sources.

On the flip side of this, if a site has a high amount of Trust Flow and low Majestic Citation Flow this means that the links pointing to that site are from very trustworthy sources .i.e. a trustworthy site that you want a link from.

So in a nutshell this shows that using a quick glance of the Majestic SEO metrics of a site can really help you to decide whether a site is technically trustworthy or not. If you are within a digital marketing agency with a high volume of links to provide. This can save you hours of quality checking sites prior to contacting them to make sure the links you build are of the highest possible

If you want to speed the process up even more, use the Majestic SEO Chrome plugin to check the metrics as you look at the site.

This check is only a quick overview and does not always apply to every site. There are many perfectly trustworthy sites out there that have a Trust Flow lower than the Citation Flow. All you need is a bit of common sense when doing this. However sites with Citation Flow of 35 along with a Trust Flow of 7 are nearly always going to be poor quality sites. There are additional things you can do to make this more accurate such as using anchor text ratios and looking at the trust ratios of entire niches. But I will be covering this in another article so stay tuned. If you would more information or advice on any of the aspects covered within this article please get in touch. Increase Seo metrics guaranteed with our professional SEO services .

Categories
Search Engine Optimization

How To Use Ahrefs Domain Rating

Ahrefs Domain Rating (or DR) is one of the most prominent metrics in Ahrefs that you can see in nearly every report we have.

A lot of our customers track fluctuations of their websites’ DR almost religiously and quite often get very nervous if it drops by a few points.

As a result, the vast majority of sites that currently have DR 30–50 will drop to nothing (because, in fact, they don’t deserve to have the “medium” DR that they currently have).

What is Ahrefs Domain Rating (DR)?

Ahrefs Domain Rating is a proprietary Ahrefs’ metric that shows the strength of a target website’s total backlink profile (in terms of its size and quality). DR is measured on a logarithmic scale from 0 to 100, with the latter being the strongest.

Are Ahrefs Domain Rating and Ahrefs Rank connected?

Yes. In fact, they’re almost the same. Ahrefs Rank orders all websites in our database by their “raw” DR values. So you can think of AR as a much more granular DR.

How do you calculate Ahrefs Domain Rating?

To put things simply, we calculate the DRof a given website the following way:

  1. Look at how many unique domains have at least 1 dofollow link to the target website;
  2. Take into account the DR values of those linking domains;
  3. Take into account how many unique domains each of those websites link to;
  4. Apply some math and coding magic to calculate “raw” DR scores;
  5. Plot these scores on a 0–100 scale (which is dynamic in nature and will “stretch” over time).

But the above information might be totally meaningless to you. So let’s reframe it in a much more actionable way:

  • The second, third and subsequent links from the same website will not improve the DR of a target website;
  • The more unique websites a site links to, the less “DR juice” it will transfer to each of them;
  • If the website is only linking to you via nofollow links, it won’t increase your DR;
  • If the linking website gets more backlinks and their DR increases, that will positively affect the DR of each website that they link to (with dofollow links).

Which DR range is considered “bad” or “spammy”?

There’s a lot of uncertainty and mixed opinions in the SEO space on the topic of “bad links.”

Some say that “real-time Penguin” will no longer penalize you for having a bunch of “questionable” links (it will simply ignore them). Others say that you should watch your backlink profile carefully and disavow any link that looks suspicious.

Ahrefs is not an SEO agency and we don’t have any hands-on experience with spammy link building and recoveries. So we can’t really comment on which is the right thing to do.

Ahrefs Domain Rating is NOT a measure of a website’s quality and legitimacy. You cannot rely on this single metric alone in determining if a website is spammy or not.

Does Ahrefs use Domain Rating to prioritize crawling the web?

Yes, Ahrefs Domain Rating is one of the factors that we feed to our own crawler. It helps us decide how many pages of a given website we want to crawl (how “deep” we want to go).