Google Pagerank vs Domain Authority (and Moz vs Alexa)
As a blogger, I take pride in the things that I write and the amount of people that read my blog posts. Google Pagerank measures neither, so why are so many people obsessed with it?
[wp_ad_camp_2]
After starting the blog in 2004, I decided last year to move to my own domain rather than relying on WordPress (and before that, Blogger, and even further back with LiveJournal). The move was an impulsive one, but I’m glad that I did it. Unfortunately in doing so, I reset all my stats, so any rankings, ratings and so on that had built up on the previous domains were now worthless.
Is this important in 2014?
Google Pagerank has, historically, been a great way to assess a website’s popularity. Browsing through the majority of blogs that I read, most have a PageRank of 2, which is a score out of ten. Believe it or not, this is quite a high score. Twitter has a PageRank of 10, for comparison, but Google themselves only have a PageRank of 9, and it’s rare to see too many blogs higher than a 3 or 4.
However, Google announced a few years ago that it was running down its use of PageRank, and despite doing a sneaky and unexpected update last year (which unfortunately for me came in too soon after I had registered my domain for it to give me a ranking), the use of PageRank to evaluate websites is fast becoming obsolete.
Unfortunately, though, many people and companies still see to rely on PageRank as an accurate way of comparing websites. I decided to take a look at the alternatives. Primarily google pagerank vs DA (Domain Authority)
Firstly, there’s Alexa. It’s a company that is owned by Amazon, and it ranks websites by popularity in a league table, offering both a global ranking and a country ranking. There are limitations to this, insomuch as Alexa draws information from people that use Alexa themselves.
Although this should give an accurate reflection of a wide range of users, the truth is it is merely a reflection of a slice of internet users (albeit millions of them). If every Alexa user chose to visit, for example, www.cancerresearchuk.org, the website would be ranked near the top of the rankings, rather than the lowly position it (probably accurately) holds. (22,712 worldwide and 1,773 in the UK).
There is a breakdown of how Alexa accumulate a ranking, where they reveal that they take an average of three months data for their global rankings and a month of data for the country rankings.
To give you an idea of how this works, I’ve compared three sites: Mine, my good friend Kip’s and the Cancer Research UK site which was mentioned above.
As you’d imagine, Cancer Research gets a higher ranking than both Kip and I, though surprisingly my site rates higher than Kip’s.
Secondly is Moz, who seem to have taken the crown from Google as king of all things SEO. Moz has a few fingers in the SEO pie. They offer both Page Authority (the equivalent of Google Pagerank) and Domain Authority, the former which measures the relative strength of an individual page, the latter measures the strength of entire domains and subdomains. It’s increasingly becoming a case of Google Pagerank vs DA when it comes to measuring how successful a website is.
Fortunately, more and more companies are leaning toward Domain Authority from Moz and away from the Pagerank that Google offers. Unlike PageRank, Domain Authority offers a score of up to 100, using a logarithmic scale, which means it’s easier to rise from 10 to 20 than it is to rise from 70 to 80. You can check your Domain Authority quickly and easily at opensiteexplorer.org, where you can even compare up to five sites.
Again, comparing the same three sites:
The screenshots clearly show what you would expect - Cancer Research is the most popular of the three, with a bigger Page Authority and Domain Authority. Kip’s site, which has been running on the same domain is higher than mine and mine is, naturally, last.
Lastly, Hubspot.
Hubspot describes themselves as “an inbound marketing software platform that helps companies attract visitors, convert leads, and close customers”
Obviously, it’s aimed at businesses, but they have a Marketing Grader which is free to use and gives a handy overview of your site. Again, for comparison:
Interestingly, Kip comes out on top of this one, and that could well be of his excellent use of social media.
Overall, there are several ways to rank a website and the contents it holds, but ultimately, rank is no real recognition of how good a website is.
Take a look at the examples above, and all three websites are a little up and down in comparison with each other. Yes, it can be reflective, and yes, it offers a quick and easy insight.
But if 100 years ago we weren’t judging books by their covers, then in the 21st century we shouldn’t be judging sites by their pageranks. Though, let’s be honest, it’s easy to see why people would.
The more that you read, the more it becomes apparent that Moz is fast becoming the defining force in SEO and ranking sites, especially as Google seem to be relinquishing their hold on the market. Moz are continually upgrading their Page Authority ranking system, meaning it’s far more up to date than Google.
It also allows a far more accurate scale given that it goes from 1-100 as opposed to 1-10 like Google.
It will be a while before people start recognising Page Authority as the standard, but the tide is already beginning to turn that way. In the meantime, there will still be debate about the battle of Google Pagerank vs Domain Authority.
by DannyUK
[wp_ad_camp_1]
For bloggers, especially those who make a living or supplement their income with their blogs, it is important to keep half an eye on the various site metrics and ranking systems. Some are more easily manipulated than others but a lot of PR companies will take a cursory glance at these stats before offering deals (rightly or wrongly) so there’s nothing wrong with knowing and improving your Moz/Alexa/etc scores. However, you are comparing apples to oranges here.
There’s a whole lot more to Google’s PageRank than the little green bar suggests, but PageRank is not the same thing as the toolbar indicator. (If you google ‘google toolbar pagerank’ you’ll find a variety of articles and opinion pieces on the relative uselessness of it.) PageRank is just a small component of how Google decides to rank a site in its SERPs, but suggesting that it’s dead or not relevant when organic search engine rankings can make or break a web based company is insane.
Moz and Google are not in the same game, so there’s no crown to be “taking”. Moz tools are just that – tools. An aid to SEOers and marketers to assist them in gaining rankings (in search engines.. like Google!) so should not be looked at as an “instead of” improvements that would increase Google ranking. Until they release a search engine based on their page and domain authority scores that takes market share from Google, they’re just another SEO company. Certainly not competition to Google and its whims.
Alexa deserves entire posts of its own on how crap it is :p but I did that years ago > http://www.jemjabella.co.uk/2007/revisiting-alexa/
Perhaps I’m being pedantic; I’m arguing semantics over your usage of Google PageRank/ranking but your post is clearly about bloggers and visible numbers & metrics. Still, it’s worth keeping in mind that if you want to do well off the search engines, the best thing to keep an eye on IS the search engines. Everything else is just frills and lace 🙂
Jem
p.s. apols if my tweet came off short and sharp – I was mid-getting-dressed! Anything nerdy on twitter piques my interest though. 😉
Jem recently posted…A vague-ish plan
That’s a great reply, thank you. Perhaps, on reflection, my post strayed a little. It started as a “Why do people only ever look at Google PageRank?” rant and went from there. Good point about Moz, and one that I hadn’t really considered. I still think Google are phasing out PageRank (which has been around since the late 90s, from memory?) which feeds back to my one sentence rant above, but that’s not to say that Google rankings are any less important, of course. I JUST WANT MY BLOG TO BE READ BY MORE PEOPLE, AND THIS FRUSTRATED BLOG POST IS REFLECTIVE OF MY INABILITY TO SAY THINGS SOMETIMES! (and despite shouting it. I don’t know if I really want to admit that!) *ahem* Thank you for your reply though, and the tweet came across fine. I try not to read too much emotion into 140 characters 😉
Interlinking webpages is definitely good, but how much to do it? I am not really sure.
I feel a good idea would be to make sure that we have substantial content on our webpages and interlink webpages for a better user experience and not worry so much about seo.
Good question though, would like to see what other have to see on this.