Need help interpreting Ranking Factors.

[joemas99]

Trying to see DA vs. mozrank and why things don't match the definitions given by seomoz. I'm comparing my site www.taxproblem.org w/ www.unclefed.com

I have more root sites linking to me and more links. I can see that the mozrank for me is 4.96 which is higher. But their mozrank is higher. How are they more popular based on how the domains, rather than the pages link to each other. That is real confusing?

Please help me understand what this means, and yes i know that right now they have better quality links, but that's not what the definition says. I'm I not understanding the definition?

mozRank of the page www.unclefed.com/

mozRank shows how popular a page is on the web. The more links to a page, the more popular it becomes. Links from important pages increase your popularity, and your mozRank, even more.

4.64 out of 10

4.64

Links to the page www.unclefed.com/

The total number of links to this page, counting links from www.unclefed.com and links that don’t increase the mozRank.

606 links

2

Root domains linking to the page www.unclefed.com/

The number of different websites with links to this page. When compared to the number of links to this page, it can reveal how the links might be distributed across the web.

279 domains

5

mozRank of the subdomain www.unclefed.com

Domain mozRank is a link popularity score based on how the domains, rather than just pages, link to each other. It is an indicator of a how popular www.unclefed.com is among domains

5.12 out of 10

5.12

[randfish]

Domain Authority should be a slightly better measurement of a domain's ability to get a page ranked (e.g. all other things being equal, a page on a DA 70 site should outrank that same page on a DA 60 site).

Domain mozRank is a rougher algorithm, based solely on the links pointing to the domain and how important those are (it's just PageRank on the domain link graph). DA actually takes DmR into account in its machine learning system.

[joemas99]

That's for clearing up the definitions. So is Domain mozrank a better measure of a domain's ability to rank a page on that site, then DA is for a domain's ability the rank the same page, other things being equal?

[randfish]

Hi Joe - a few items on our metrics:

• Domain mozRank basically measures PageRank on the domain link level (only looking at links between domains and pretending there's no individual pages).
• mozRank is a page level metric (like PageRank) and just measures raw link juice
• Domain Authority uses a mashup of every metric we've got (hundreds) plus thousands of derivatives of those metrics to create a score that best predicts ranking ability of a page/site for a random keyphrase (so it doesn't include things like anchor text or on-page, because it doesn't know what a page might want to rank for).

These scores can be quite different across different sites, and you can be higher in one and lower in another. I wouldn't stress too much about the comparisons, though. If you're losing in the rankings to a site with better metrics, they may partially help explain why, but the numbers themselves won't do anything for you, so I wouldn't worry about optimizing toward them.

Also - for every one of these metrics, more good links from high quality, trustworthy sources will help (and they'll likely help your Google rankings, too). Just make sure to give appropriate time - Linkscape's metrics update once per month with data from the prior month, so it could be 40-60 days before you see your link building efforts reflected entirely/accurately in the numbers.

Cheers!