A website’s search engine ranking depends on more than 200 different factors and many more correlations. Google or other popular search engines never disclose all ranking factors. But, over time and thousands of experiments, SEO experts have discovered the major ranking factors and correlations that determine a website’s worth. In both cases, it all comes back to having quality backlinks. The more quality backlinks you gain, the higher your search engine ranking will become. Building quality backlinks includes getting a link from a high page rank webpage on an authoritative website.

Source: linkdex

 When you earn a backlink, the link juice will pass from the high ranking page through the outbound link to it. When the page rank is higher, the more link juice that will be transferred. In the backlink factors, the page rank of a web page has always been more valued because the outbound link depends on it for a boost. At first, the concept of page rank was developed by Larry Page in the late 1990s for the early search engine algorithms. Nowadays, people misuse the concept of page rank to simply obtain higher search engine rankings.
As a result, Google started to devalue its own page rank, which shocked the SEO world and made experts find another way to rely on. Though Google used to update page rank three to four times each year, it has since dropped even further from once a year to 14 months. The Hangout with John Mueller gave a small sign that page rank may really be dead and Google will likely not update this in the near future.
Just have a look at the previous page rank update history from Google:

  • December 5/6, 2013
  • February 4, 2013
  • November 7, 2012
  • August 2, 2012
  • May 2, 2012
  • February 7, 2012
  • November 7, 2011
  • August 2011
  • July 2011
  • June 2011
  • January 2011
  • April 2010
  • December 31, 2009
  • October 30, 2009
  • May 27/28, 2009
  • June 2009
  • April 1/2, 2009
  • December 31, 2008
  • September 27, 2008
  • July 26, 2008
  • April 29, 2008
  • January 9, 2008
  • October 26, 2007
  • April 28, 2007

As you can see, updates to page rank have become further and further apart over the last few years. This could be due to the fact that page rank became leverage for spammers to manipulate. Spammers would start selling links for its own PR, which was totally unacceptable and violated Google’s strict guidelines. Thus, websites who bought links became penalized for their spammy actions.

So, now what? If page rank is truly dead, then how can SEO professionals analyze the authority of a website and mark a ranking signal of any web page? As Google has its page rank to classify websites, other search engines and tool developing companies like MOZ have their own SEO metrics for analyzing the site’s search rankings. That’s precisely where Ahrefs comes in.

 

Ahrefs is a search engine optimization tool or site search explorer that can be utilized to analyze website content and its backlinks easily. Ahrefs has developed an innovative algorithm for analyzing the backlinks of any web page. From there, it deduces a number ranging from 0 to 100, which is known as the Ahrefs Domain Rank. The Ahrefs Domain Rank works on the following factors:

When Website “A” has a ranking and website “B” is linked to it, then more ranking will pass to the Website “B” domain. Similarly, the same domain with multiple outbound links will transfer low rankings to each link. Once this process runs a dozen times, a fix number will be assigned to the website, thus creating the Ahrefs Domain Rank. Ahrefs also will give URL Ranks, which will vary based on the URL of a website.

Ahrefs Rank is rapidly becoming a popular alternative similar to page rank and could be the real replacement. Of course, there are many other popular SEO metrics too, including:

  • MOZ Trust
  • MOZ Page Authority
  • Majestic SEO Trust Flow
  • Ahrefs Domain Rank

The real difference between these metrics comes with their accuracy in analyzing a website’s backlinks and creating a useful ranking. According to correlation with US search rankings, the following data has been calculated:

  • MOZ Trust correlates at 66 percent.
  • MOZ Page Authority correlates at 68 percent.
  • Majestic Trust Flow correlates at 72.79 percent.
  • Ahrefs Domain Rank correlates at 76.32 percent.

With such impressive data supporting it, Ahrefs Domain Rank is clearly the most precise SEO metric available today with a 76.32 percent correlation rate. Since Ahrefs Rank gives you rankings for separate URLS and is built under the same principle of Domain Rank, there’s a significant positive correlation with Google’s search rankings.

 

According to Ahrefs, it’s easy for a website to rank between 0-30, then soar to between 70-100 as quality backlinks start flowing in. A rank of 0-30 means a domain is unpopular; 31-70 means that the domain is average, and 71-100 means that the domain is highly popular. Some high Ahrefs Domain Rank sites that I’ve found are:

Final Words

Overall, Ahrefs Domain Rank has the highest correlation with the Google search rankings. That’s why I always recommend that Ahrefs Domain Rank be the first SEO metric tool to check whenever you’re analyzing a website. Not only does Ahrefs Domain Rank give you useful ranking metrics, but there’s also other useful factors easily detected here. Hands down, Ahrefs has replaced the dead page rank to become the best site explorer tool for link clean up.