90 Digital CEO Nick Garner talks about Page Level Metrics in this edition of CalvinAyre.com’s SEO Tip of the Week.
It’s easy to lose sight of the most important things in SEO, like why you might rank, so it’s time to look back at page level metrics.
Over the years, I have done a lot of data analysis because it’s important for me to understand where to look for links and why some links work and others don’t.
One way of doing this has been to reverse engineer backlink profiles of sites that have sprung up out of nowhere and remain in a high position across competitive phrases for more than a couple of months. My thinking is… they have done something the search algorithm loves!
I use Majestic (I’m a massive fan boy) and I download all the link data for the domain I’m analyzing and from that I filter the links, looking at the links which have the best page metrics associated with them.
I.e. a page has a link on it, what are the metrics for that page? The metrics I use are a combination of Majestic trust flow and Citation flow.
Anyhow, the main point is that almost without fail, the winning sites are the ones with the greatest number of links with good page metrics.
You may go – DUH! of course, Nick, but because of the way we prospect for links i.e. we typically look at sites ranking on Google and if they have decent domain metrics, we go and pitch them for a link. And usually the analysis stops there once a placement is made.
All this simply means we miss on the most important detail of all: will the page that my links on give me lots of Page Rank?
To validate my analysis I have also been looking at the big sites that rank well in iGaming i.e. the Paddy Power’s of the world and there is a consistent pattern where they just have more great links from strong pages, not necessarily strong domains.
To give this context, you might get a post on Huffington Post about igaming and somehow you might get a link onto that page going back to your affiliate site. Great!
Not really…the catch is that page will never see the home page where all the Page Rank is and it’s unlikely to even be placed on a significant category page. The post gets archived fairly quickly, may be even before Google has time to process it and give it Page Rank and it gets buried.
I have seen 1,000’s of such posts with virtually no good metrics at all on a page level.
When we go link prospecting, we usually look at domain level metrics because they are the best way to easily understand if site is strong or not. However when you want to analyse best pages for the site, it gets really cumbersome because you have to run 100’s of reports on ‘best pages’ from domains you are prospecting for.
My answer is 90 SEO DataGrabber a free excel 2013 tool which talks to Majestic’s API and allows me to get the best backlinks from 1000’s of sites in one big data grab. From that I can manipulate the information in excel and look the best pages and work out whether I can get a link from these sites with nice page level metrics. Altogether this is a massive time saver and gives me depth and spread of data I’ve never had before.
In essence, I now look domain level metrics 25% of the time i.e. I’ll trawl using those metrics but I will pay 75% of my attention on the actual pages where the best links are so I know I have a decent chance of replicating those links and therefore nailing rankings.
