What factors does the Keyword Difficulty Tool measure?

[SamBuck]

Hi Guys

I am new to this community and finding loads of informative stuff here. The keyword difficulty tool looks very interesting. I think google keyword tool competetion field is based on PPC competetion? Will i be right in saying that the moz keyword difficulty tool measures top 10 ranking pages, their age, backlinks etc?

[EssEEmily]

I think Anthony's response was perfect, but I just wanted to add that I think that ranking with a DR of <40 is very doable. It's a great tool for relative difficulty.

[AnthonyMangia]

I would certainly say it's achievable.  Whether the score is 40 or 70, you're going to need to have a well-optimized website and execute a strong linkbuilding campaign, but the keyword difficulty score can be a good measure of the relative difficulty of any given keyword to another.

[SamBuck]

So taking a simplistic view, would you guys say an overall Difficulty rank of < 40 is rankable?

[AndreVanKets]

Be sure to click on "view full report" and you get even more factors to compare with.

[AnthonyMangia]

SEOmoz pulls its traffic data from the Google AdWords API, but as you rightly suspected, the rest of the data on the page includes the top 10 ranking websites and their link data.  Page Authority and Domain Authority are scores that SEOmoz gives webpages/sites based on their own internal algorithm.  These scores are based off of link data and other factors - they are discussed in depth here.