Understanding what a domain is can be a challenge for anyone starting out on SEO. But at the same time this goes hand in hand with any solid backlink strategy. What we will do here is to break down 4 main components that everyone needs to look at when thinking about making a comparison between different domains.
Moz: Domain Authority
When analysing a particular website one of the metrics that is most commonly used is Moz’s domain authority. In order to determine Domain Authority, Moz elaborated an algorithm that takes into account ALL the relevant factors that – according to Moz – takes into consideration and from this assessment it achieves a particular ranking for a particular website.
Domain authority is, therefore, a subjective assessment of a website’s power using a set of criteria identified by Moz to be relevant. This number gives us a general number for the quality of a website.
Moz: Page Authority
Page authority is a more particular understanding of domain authority. It doesn’t look at the whole domain but uses the same criteria to look at a particular page. Therefore it can happen that a website has a domain authority much high than a particular page authority. The reverse can also happen – when, for example, a particular page is referred a lot across the internet.
Page authority provides us with a more detailed analysis of particular landing pages.
Majestic: Trust Flow
Majestic does a great job in checking the backlink profile of a website. And with trust flow, you will get a sense of what goes on with the signals that a particular site gets from the web. In other words, trust flow aims to measure the quality of the websites that link back to your website.
It’s all about quality in this metric. If for example, a website gets a number of links from low-quality websites, then this particular ranking would be low. The reverse is, of course, true.
With Trust Flow, Majestic aims to create an overall assessment of the quality of different websites and from this assessment it gives a particular ranking to the website that is being inspected.
Majestic: Citation Flow
Citation flow is more directly connected not with the quality of a particular platform but with the number of citations that a website gets from the internet. Quantity of citations is here much more relevant than quality of the citation.
Why is quantity relevant as well? It is important for a website to rank well in google that his domain is referred many times on the internet. So quantity is relevance.
Majestic: Trust Flow and Citation Flow, the Optimal Number
When we are truing to buy domains, for example, one of the things we should be careful about is for the trust flow and the citation flow to be quite similar. If there is a difference between these two numbers we may run into problems.
Imagine that we get 40 citations from different websites but these websites are really bad quality. This would basically mean that our citation flow would be high but our trust flow really low. In other words, the website is not as credible as it could be.
In order to find a good website these two numbers need to be closely connected.
