Keyword difficulty tool - bit confused here!!

[activitysuper]

Hi,

Got a question about the keyword difficulty tool, I'm new to seomoz so might be a silly question but here goes.

Q: It takes the top 10 results from Google under a certain search query, the results displayed gives a rough breakdown of what power the page on the search results has along with the root domain.

It looks like it rewards the best out of the bunch for each section with a tick, so 1 tick per column for the best performer.

Now I would have thought if one of the websites in the top 10 had all 4 ticks it would rank at the top of the list but this is not the case.

What else would come into play to make others which have no ticks rank higher then one which has all.

Sorry if this sounds really confusing.

[EGOL]

Overwhelming link strength.

[Bevelwise]

The Keyword Difficulty tool looks at results what whatever search query you specify, but the metrics it uses to score those top 10 sites look mostly at the link metrics of the mentioned domains.  Really since those results are relative to search query you entered it would be implied that those results that rank highly also probably have good on page seo metrics in place but they may not.  The result that may rank 3rd might have a stronger link profile, but contextually it may be getting outranked on by other sites that also have strong profiles but have better on page metrics.  Also things like domain age and other factors might influencing that.  Search engines use hundreds of factors and the keyword difficulty tool reverse engineers those factors very well, but it's not perfect.