What Exactly Does "Linking Root Domains" mean??

[Caseman]

What Exactly Does "Linking Root Domains" mean?? And how does it affect your ranking for certain Keywords?? Thanks

[adamxj2]

Ahhh the lightbulb just went off! Thanks a bunch

[KeriMorgret]

It's not a 1:1 relationship. My site can have three backlinks from moz.com, but that only counts as one linking root domain (since the domain for each of those backlinks is moz.com). Does that help?

[adamxj2]

Hi Doug! Thanks for your info. Is this also considered a "backlink"? Or is there a difference between the two?

[iampm]

Hi Doug and all,

I know this maybe a bit late and to be honest, opening an open ended question, but "what factors do you think are involved in some links being better than others?"

I would say things such as Page Authority, Domain Authority and SEO friendly content would all play a part, for a number of my retail clients, I know that Google Merchant compliance also helps, is there anything else you, or any other fellow MOZ'ers may can think of ?

Just trying to get some more ideas and also spark some productive convo !

Thanks,

Peter.

[KeriMorgret]

Hi Jennifer,

This is an older question, and it's probably best in this case to start a new thread with your question so it gets a little more visibility. Thanks!

[nng]

a lot of my 'crawl errors' (such as duplicate title) are for pages that have only 1 linking root domain. Does that mean that it is only linked from my domain?

(I'm trying to determine if it is worthwhile to spend time fixing these duplicate title errors - they aren't real site pages and they shouldn't be displayed or linked anywhere, I'm not even sure why or how they are being crawled. it's basically like a real site page but with an ID number appearing in the URL, but on the real site that ID number does not appear);

any info is much apprececiated!

[Budskab]

thanks for this link -- i see i've been checking far too often path of the impatient beginner

[Futura]

thanks doug, i also wanted to know the exact meaning of this.

[DougRoberts]

Hi Vasil, the number of linking root domains (and all of the link metrics) comes from the Mozscape (previously known as linkscape) index which is usually updated each month. It's the same index used by Open Site Explorer.

You can find more about the update timetable here:

https://seomoz.zendesk.com/entries/345964-linkscape-update-schedule

Hope this helps!

[VasilTasev]

I have one question regarding the data the Keyword Difficulty Report shows. How does it get updated? I mean how often, because for my website I can see a low number of Linking Root Domains, which does not correspond to the real number of domains linking to my website. Thanks in advance.

[DougRoberts]

Hi Mark, I'd be wary of making assumptions based on just one (or two) metrics.

Remember it's not just the number of links, but the link equity of the links too. All things being equal, one site's page with a reasonable number of links from low value blogs etc may be outranked by another site's page that has just a couple of links from authoritative site but even then this is massively oversimplifying things.

Page linking root domains are worth more than domain linking root domains, but this is normally off set by the quantity of domain links vs the one or two a page may get.

By the time you throw in page relevance, anchor text, freshness, social, etc thing get more than a little fuzzy!

Moz's Keyword Difficulty & SERP analysis tool does a good job of laying out all the relative strengths and weaknesses:

http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/keyword-difficulty

[DougRoberts]

In a nutshell, it's the number of other sites that link to your page/site. You can find more info here:

https://moz.com/help/guides/moz-pro-overview/links/competitive-metrics

Number of linking root domains (# of linking root domains) includes only the number of unique root domains linking. Two links from the same website would only be counted as one linking root domain.

Engineers at SEOmoz have found that "# of linking root domains" is much more highly correlated to real rankings than "# of links".

Generally the more "connected" your page is to the the greater the authority the search engines will consider your site to have.  Not all links are equal though, and there are other factors involved...

Hope this helps.