Page Rank Metrics – Everything you should know about

When a user enters a search query, the search engine’s number one goal is to return results that are high-quality, relevant and able to best give them what they want. One of the 200+ factors Google takes into consideration to determine which web pages best fit the bill is Page Rank.

Since Google wants to return page one results that are high quality, relevant, and trustworthy, it may return web pages with better Page Rank scores higher up in the SERPs, although Page Rank is only one of many ranking factors taken into consideration.

Since Page Rank is only one factor in the Google ranking algorithm, it’s important to remember that a high Page Rank does not guarantee high rankings — but it can significantly help.

Google PageRank

PageRank (PR) is an algorithm used by Google Search to rank websites in their search engine results. PageRank was named after Larry Page, one of the founders of Google. PageRank is a way of measuring the importance of website pages.

How do you increase your Google page rank?

Follow these suggestions to improve your search engine optimization (SEO) and watch your website rise the ranks to the top of search engine results.

Five Ways to Improve your Site’s Ranking (SEO)

Publish Relevant Content
Update Your Content Regularly
Metadata
- Title Metadata
- Description Metadata
- Keyword Metadata
Have a link-worthy site
Use alt tags

Domain Authority

Domain Authority (DA) is a search engine ranking score developed by Moz that predicts how well a website will rank on search engine result pages (SERPs). A Domain Authority score ranges from one to 100, with higher scores corresponding to a greater ability to rank.

Domain Authority is calculated by evaluating multiple factors, including linking root domains and the number of total links, into a single DA score. This score can then be used when comparing websites or tracking the “ranking strength” of a website over time.

I’ve put this chart together to help you understand how your site fares from a DA perspective.

DA Rating

1-10 Poor. Your site is young and weak. You have a lot of growing to do.

11-20 Decent. Your site isn’t stellar, but you’re doing better. It would be good to grow.

21-30 Fair. Your site shows signs of SEO, but there are many things you can and should do to improve.

31-40 Competitive. A lot of startups find themselves in this DA range. It’s not bad, and you’re beginning to get close to the sweet spot.

41-50 Good. Now, you’re getting somewhere. This is a nice place to be, and many good e-commerce sites find themselves squarely in this category.

51-60 Strong. As you swing out of the lower half of the scale, you’re beginning to get much healthier. This is a good place to be.

61-70 Excellent. A DA at this level represents a great site with a lot of recognition, a lot of link backs, and a considerable authority in its niche. Many .edus are in this space.

71-80 Outstanding. You’re dominating in the SERPs and owning your niche. Quick Sprout is a 73.

81-90 Very outstanding. You’re in the upper echelons of authority. You can consider yourself to have arrived.

91-100 Rare. These sites are household names — Wikipedia, Facebook, New York Times, etc. Your site will probably never attain this level. Only a minuscule fraction of a percentage of sites on the Internet ever get this high.

How To Increase Your Domain Authority

Pick a domain name that is relevant to your niche
Optimize on-page SEO including your title tags, image alt tags, and the content
Produce high-quality content that people will link to
Include internal links to improve the user experience
Run an audit to remove bad and broken links for a healthy website
Go mobile-friendly
Check your Domain Authority score on Open Site Explorer by entering your website’s URL
Become the expert within your niche
Make sure your website loads fast to reduce bounce rate
Do content promotion via social media – Facebook, Twitter, Google+., LinkedIn, Snapchat
Don’t forget to increase page authority as well!

Page Authority in Page Rank

Page authority is an SEO term used to describe the probability that a specific page from your site will be found on a search engine. Page authority is based on a logarithmic scale from 0 to 100 and deals with the relevance of information and links within site pages to one another. Higher page authority means greater chances of your page showing up on search engines, and that your page will be placed closer to the top of the search results. Note that page authority is related to the pages within sites, not the site itself.

How to Increase Your Page Authority

The following are the most effective ways that you can increase your Page Authority:

Create Fresh Content

Make sure your content is interesting
Make sure you update your content regularly
Make sure your content is useful and relevant
Make sure your content is easy to read.

How can you make your content easier to read?

By breaking it up into smaller paragraphs with different headers as well as by using bullet points and numbers to deliver important information. Using visuals, such as infographics or images, to break up the monotony of text is a good idea as well.

Earn External Links

External links are important for a variety of reasons. The more external links you have, the more exposure your web pages will have.

For example, if a website posts a link to one of your blog posts in an article, then their audience will be exposed to your brand, which can help bring more web traffic to your site as well.

Obviously, the higher quality the site is that links to your pages, the higher quality the traffic will be. Additionally, external links from high-quality sites are considered a strong indicator of quality – something Google deems incredibly important.

So how can you earn external links?

First of all, the content needs to be good. Without good content, you’re facing an uphill battle.

Secondly, promote your content on social media. The more social signals you have, the more exposure your content has, which means other sites have a better chance of coming across it.

Thirdly, you should also link to other authority sites in your blog posts. These sites will take note of the fact that you are sending them traffic and will often return the favour by linking to your site as well.

Last but not least, writing guest blogs for other sites within your industry is a good way to earn external links while also building brand authority to boot.

Use Images

Believe it or not, but the use of images can have quite a big impact on your Page Authority. Using images – especially images that are of original content – can provide your page with a number of benefits.

The following are a few of the benefits of using images throughout your content:

Images make content more readable
Images are more shareable
Images can improve SEO

Trust Flow

Trust Flow is a Score based on quality, on a scale between 0 and 100. Majestic collated many trusted seed sites based on a manual review of the web. Sites closely linked to a trusted seed site can see higher scores, whereas sites that may have some questionable links would see a much lower score.

Keep in mind that Trust Flow, like Moz metrics, are not metrics that are used by the search engines. They are metrics that third-party companies have developed to approximate how the search engines may rank content.

How to increase Trust flow for a website

I came across a few things to increase trust flow

write engaging content with high relevancy
Registering the domain name for a long period
Having dofollow links in a good Domain Authority website increases the trust flow
Having backlinks in .gov and .edu will carry a more trust score of your website
Internal Linking or inbound linking of your website also increases the trust flow and citation flow score
Sharing the content of social media websites will increase the trust flow because social media sites have a higher domain authority score
Guest blogging on the trustworthy website will raise the trust flow score if you can get a backlink from the guest post
Participate actively in top-notch forums which provides you dofollow links to your website. This will help you to increase both trust flow.

Citation Flow

Citation Flow is a metric trademarked by Majestic that refers to the popularity of a link in a site without considering the quality of these links. The perfect example is porn sites. They have a very high Citation Flow but these links are often not qualitative. A website with a lot of links pointing to it will be influential and will get a good citation flow.

It is good to know that if Trust Flow increases, then Citation Flow should also increase. However, if Citation Flow increases, there is no proof that Trust Flow will increase too. So if a website with high Citation Flow flow points to your website, your Citation Flow should get a boost. But if websites with high Citation Flow but low Trust Flow link to your website, it will negatively impact your Trust Flow.

Alexa Rank

Alexa is a product of Amazon that maintains a ranking of websites according to their performance.

In the case of a website, the daily number of traffic visitors and page views decides the Alexa ranking on websites.

More traffic = increase in Alexa ranking

Important Tips to improve Alexa Ranking of a Website

Write Quality Content
Install Alexa Toolbar
Use Alexa Rank Widget
Social Networking
Submit Websites/Blog to Search Engine and Directories
Claim/Verify your Website on Alexa.com
Create custom Toolbar by using Alexa Toolbar Creator
Increase Search Traffic on Your Website

Spam Score

Spam score is something like your DA PA. But it shows negativity of your website.

It also invents by Moz.

Here is an example to understand it.

If many spammy websites are linking you then your spam score is high. And the majority of your backlinks comes from not spammy websites then your spam score is low.

Moz’s Spam Score is a simple #/17 metric. If your site has 0-4 spam flags, it’s probably fine. If it has 5-7 spam flags, it can be getting into more troublesome territory. If it has 8-17 spam flags, you’re seriously running the risk of a penalty the next time Google chooses to dole them out.

External Backlinks for Page Rank

External backlinks are those links that link to your site or any of its pages/content and these links are counted as if those sites are vouching for your site’s high quality. This gets noticed by search engines and as a result, your site’s ranking can improve significantly.

It is better to get backlinks or vouched by those sites which are either equal to your site’s quality, content, repute etc. or better than your site with higher Page Rank (PR). Otherwise, getting links from sites with low Page Rank and/or no established reputation won’t help much in creating the much needed ‘link juice’.

Referring Domains for Page Rank

The Referring domain is the domain that people “came from” when visiting your site.

For example, if you look in google for your name or some unique part of your website and Google returns your page in the results, when you click on it it takes you to your website. Google is thus the referring domain!

If you link to your site from your signature in forums, and people click on it, then the forum becomes the referring site or domain.

EDU Backlinks for Page Rank

EDU backlinks refer to links obtained on website domains with EDU extension. When an educational institution registers a domain name they will usually have a .edu extension. These .edu domains are often valuable sites to have to link to you because they can carry a lot of authority and sometimes positively influence search engine results.

GOV Backlinks for Page Rank

A .gov backlink is a hyperlink from a website with the .gov domain name extension.

.gov domains are government owned websites. They usually carry some authority and weight and naturally can be very strong backlinks to have.

Beware paying for .gov backlinks

There may be perfectly legitimate offers for .gov links, but in many cases, an SEO firm or consultant is forced to obtain .gov links using grey hat methods, or in the worse case black hat and downright spamming or theft. Go the extra mile if you’re ever paying for any kind of advertising on a .gov domain name, and find out how these backlinks are obtained before you do anything.

PR Quality

PR is PageRank. It is an algorithm for links analyzing of your website to determine the importance of your website. It is developed by Google. It analyses your website and ranks your website in the scale 0 to 10. Every page in the Google database has its own PageRank. The higher the value, the better ranked the page is. In order to receive a higher PageRank, you must receive more links to your site from other websites. The higher the PR, the greater the potential the site/page has to rank better.

Domain Age

Domain age refers to the length of time that a website has been registered and active. Domain age conveys trust to website visitors and to the search engines.

Two factors are considered in the age of a domain name. First, is the length of time that a domain has been registered. Second, is the age of the website in regards to how long that it has been active, or how long that it has had crawlable content on the web. The search engines factor domain age from the time that the website is first crawled by the search engines and when the first inbound link to the website is noticed.

Domain age is important for SEO purposes because the age of a website is a search engine ranking factor. The search engines want to provide users with the best possible results. As a website age over time, it becomes more trusted in the eyes of the search engines as long as it has quality content and a robust portfolio of relevant inbound links that have been established over time. An older domain age conveys longevity, whereas there is more uncertainty regarding what a new website can or will offer to visitors.

While domain age does convey trust to the search engines, it is only one of many ranking factors and owners of new domains shouldn’t worry that their website will never be able to compete. It may take more time, but the focus is always on quality content and gaining relevant inbound links.

HTTP Response Codes

HTTP status codes, like 404, 301 and 500, might not mean much to a regular visitor, but for SEO, they are incredibly important. Not only that, search engine spiders, like Googlebot, use these to determine the health of a site. These status codes offer a way of seeing what happens between the browser and the server. Several of these codes indicate an error, for instance, that the requested content can’t be found, while others simply suggest a successful delivery of the requested material. In this article, we’re taking a closer look at the most important HTTP header codes and what they mean for SEO.

Different ranges of HTTP status codes

There are five different ranges of HTTP status codes, defining different aspects of the transaction process between the client and the server. Below you’ll find the five ranges and its main goal: