Zen and the art of link building.

[max.favilli]

If I understood correctly MozTrust measure the trust of a website, so getting a backlink from a website with a high MozTrust is generally better than getting a backlink from a website with a lower MozTrust, correct?

I also saw a loose correlation between MozTrust and Majestic TrustFlow; in general if I take a list of websites and I order them by MozTrust or TrustFlow I get a somehow similar list, even if there's jumps here and there and the positions are not always the same. This reinforce my belief is better to have backlinks from website with high MozTrust (and high TrustFlow).

I also understood Domain Authority is, instead, a measure of the potential ranking of a website.

So, the two are measuring things which are different, MozTrust is telling you how good it is to get a link from a certain website, DA is telling you how much probable it is to rank well for that website.

While hunting for backlinks and trying to figure out what is the best place to get one, I also use a third metric, the number of TOP20 positions for the website. I am doing this on a pure empirical basis, because in my little experience I saw much better results with backlinks when the the linking domain had a lot of positions in TOP20.

If I got everything correctly, I would expect a correlation between all these factors. If a website has a high DA I would expect it to rank well and have a lot of TOP20 positions, also backlinks from that website should be worth something.

But then... I have found a bunch of websites with a high DA, like 40/50/60, with incredibly small amount of TOP20 positions, like 5 or 10 or 50, and with a respectable MozTrust.

And also I saw excellent results with backlinks from websites with 50k TOP20 position and a low DA and a low MozTrust and negligible results with backlinks from websites with a high DA/MozTrust but little or none TOP20 positions.

What is your experience?

As anyone an explanation of why DA/MozTrust/TrustFlow doesn't match with the count of SERP top postions?

Am I getting too geeky?

[DmitriiK]

Hello, there.

I'll try to explain in short.

MozTrust - is WHO links to you. DA - is how MANY link to you = popularity. TrustFlow of Majestic is very similar to MozTrust, but since it's two different companies and two different algorithms - here you get the difference in result.

Now, why these metrics don't match the SERPS. SERPS depend on many things - far not just DA or Trust. Mainly is on keywords. So, if you have very specific service/product and you are trying to rank for whole bunch of longtail keyphrases, but at the same time dont have any links - you will still rank in top 20 for whatever many phrases.

Example: you can make any website rank for "super awesome blue and red cat sitting on a stainless steel shelf" and so on. So, if you have whole bunch of pages, optimized for such keyphrases - you will be ranking in top 20 for whole bunch of keywords. However, it doesn't mean whatsoever that you are not spammer (therefore Trust metric will be low) and you can have vurtially no links (therefore low DA).

And the reverse way. If you have high DA/Trust, but trying to rank for very competitive phrase - you won't be able to (or at least the  chances are low).

Additionally, high DA doesn't always go with high Trust, it's much better after Penguin update, but still, if Google hasn't caught you as spammer, you'll have high DA, but since the links are coming from low trust websites - your trust metric will be low.

Hope this make sense and helps.