Search engine optimization metrics

A number of metrics are available to marketers interested in search engine optimization. Search engines and software creating such metrics all use their own crawled data to derive at a numeric conclusion on a website's organic search potential. Since these metrics can be manipulated, they can never be completely reliable for accurate and truthful results.

Google PageRank

Google PageRank (Google PR) is one of the methods Google uses to determine a page's relevance or importance. Important pages receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results. Google PageRank (PR) is a measure from 0 - 10. Google PageRank is based on backlinks. PageRank works by counting the number and quality of links to a page to determine a rough estimate of how important the website is. The underlying assumption is that more important websites are likely to receive more links from other websites. However, Google claims there will be no more PageRank updates, rendering this metric as outdated. As of 15 April 2016, Google has officially removed the PR score from their Toolbar.

InLink Rank & Domain InLinkRank

InLink Rank is a proprietary score calculated by SEO PowerSuite that estimates the importance of web pages, determined by the number and quality of incoming links to the page (both external and internal). The InLink Rank formula is based off the same algorithm as the original Google PageRank and is determined by the number and weight of incoming links to a page. The score is re-calculated non-stop on a logarithmic scale from 0 and 100. As InLink Rank gets updated, which happens around once a month, it also expands its index, calculating the score for new pages that weren't previously assigned an InLink Rank. InLink Rank, calculated for the website in general, is called Domain InLink Rank.

Domain Rating (DR)

Domain Rating (DR) is a proprietary metric by Ahrefs widely shared in SEO link-building. DR shows the strength of a website's backlink profile compared to others in their database on a 100-point scale. DR considers both the quantity and quality of backlinks. Ahrefs also looks at how many other unique sites each linking domain links to.

Alexa Traffic Rank

Alexa Traffic Rank is based on the amount of traffic recorded from users that have the Alexa toolbar installed over a period of three months. A site's ranking is based on a combined measure of Unique Visitors and Pageviews. Unique Visitors are determined by the number of unique Alexa users who visit a site on a given day. Pageviews are the total number of Alexa user URL requests for a site. Alexa's Traffic Ranks are for domains only and do not give separate rankings for subpages within a domain or subdomains. At the end of 2021, Amazon announced that the Alexa project was going to be discontinued on May 1, 2022.

Moz Domain Authority

Domain Authority (DA), a website metric developed by Moz, is a predictive metric to determine a website's traffic and organic search engine rankings. Domain Authority is based on different link metrics, such as number of linking root domains, number of total backlinks, and the distance of backlinks from the home page of websites.

Moz Page Authority

Compared to Domain Authority which determines the ranking strength of an entire domain or subdomain, Page Authority measures the strength of an individual page.

It's a score developed by Moz on a 100-point logarithmic scale. Unlike TrustFlow, domain authority does not account for spam.

Citation Flow & Trust Flow

Trust Flow is a proprietary metric by Majestic to estimate the quality of links, pointing to pages and websites. A web page with higher Trust Flow than Citation Flow will usually have good-quality links. Citation Flow is a score showing the number of links pointing to any given website. Citation Flow does not consider the quality of a link.

Netcraft

Similar to many other websites like Alexa, Netcraft features a toolbar that provides users with the ability to view page-hit popularity and various web server metrics along with aggregated user provided website feedback.

Core Web Vitals

In 2021, Google added Core Web Vitals, three user experience metrics, as new search ranking factors. The metrics measure loading speed, interactivity, and visual stability, and together with mobile-friendliness, safety, security, and the lack of pop-ups, these signals estimate the overall page experience. CWV are composed of three parts:

• Largest Contentful Paint: calculates the time of rendering of th largest content element.
• First Input Delay: measures page responsiveness, i.e., how much time it takes on a page to react to the first user action (click, tap, etc.).
• Cumulative Layout Shift: evaluates visual stability of a page, calculating how far some elements shift on a page unexpectedly.

Google integrated the Page Experience Report in the Search Console and provided some other tools to measure CWB, namely PageSpeed Insights and Lighthouse.