MozRank per Link: Valuable or Worthless?

[conquerapathy-64412]

Since the MozRank and MozTrust metrics are on a logarithmic scale, I'm wondering if it's still valuable to get a general idea of the quality of a site's link profile by calculating:

MozRank / Total Links

MozTrust / Total Links

Would this be useful, or is it always going to be higher for sites with lower MozRank & MozTrust since it's "easier" to achieve the lower values?

[Cyrus-Shepard]

In general, total links isn't a very useful metric. This is because it can include counts of sitewide links, such as footer and sidebar links, repeated over and over again. In general, these links don't have much value.

The "preferred" link count is the number of linking root domains. According to our ranking factor study, this correlates higher with top rankings than just about any other metric.

Overall, you may simply want to look at DomainAuthority, which takes both MozRank and MozTrust into consideration. It's an even better predictor of ranking strength than # of linking root domains. (about the only thing higher is number of linking root domains with partial match anchor text.)

Does this answer your question? I think using straight DA would give you a better indication of the quality of a site's link profile than other methods.

[conquerapathy-64412]

Thanks for the quick response Cyrus!

To clarify a little bit:

I have been working on a site that's less than 1 year old, but all of the competitors have been around and building links for 3-5+ years.

Their DA is in the 40's, and ours is currently at 23, even with less than 1/4 the linking root domains of the site with DA 36.

So, I started thinking, and wondered if there's a quick way to figure out if I'm on track in terms of the quality of my links, relative to my competitors.

Would dividing MozRank, MozTrust or Domain Authority by Linking Root Domains be a decent way of determining that, or does the exponential increase in difficulty to boost these metrics make this method useless?

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Ah, I get it now. I'm not a math whiz, but the exponential factor is certainly going to throw you for a loop in this calculation. Domain Authority uses an exponential base between 6 and 7. (meaning a DA of 50 is 6-7 times more powerful than a DA of 40) I'm sure there's some way to take that into your calculation, but I went to public school so it's beyond my simple math skills.

But you might be on to something. My estimation is that a site with a DA of 40 is about 30x more powerful than a site with a DA of 23, all other things being equal.

This conversation reminds me of searching out your true competition, and search visibility. If you continue down this path, you may be interested in these topics.

https://seogadget.co.uk/search-engine-visibility/

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/defining-your-true-competitors