Link Building Blog, News and Articles - Textlinkbrokers.com/blog

Blog Homepage : Category - 1. Link Building Basics

This is a very important question that every link builder should know the answer to.

Question: What’s the Difference Between Pagerank and Authoritativeness?

Pagerank is a metric that is used to calculate the number and the quality of the links coming into a site.  A site with a high pagerank either has a large amount of lower pr sites linking to it or a couple higher pagerank ones, or a combination of both. 

Pagerank, while it is good at showing link popularity, is not the only factor that the search engines use when determining how well a site should rank for its keywords/pages.

Authority is a calculation based on many metrics, of which pagerank is just one.  It is possible to have a high pagerank and still be relatively non-authoritative, and it is also possible to be an authority without having a high pagerank. 

With that being said, often times you will find that high pagerank sites are usually more authoritative then lower pr ones, not because they have high pagerank but because sites that are high in pagerank usually rank well in the other metrics as well. There are ways to unnaturally increase your pagerank and thus not have the other qualities that make you a authority, but in the overall scheme of things those kinds of sites are of a low percentage of the total number of high pagerank sites. This is why many people, even more experienced link builders, still use pagerank as a rough indicator.  And indicator that is used to pre-judge sites on their potential to be authorities.  The experienced link builder would then take that list and use it as a starting point to then begin digging deeper into the other factors.

So What are some of the other factors/metrics used to calculate authoritativeness?

Some of the factors are:

- The age of the site

- How much traffic the site gets (don’t think for a second that the search engines don’t have access to this data)

- The size of the site

- It’s link profile (we will talk about this in another article)

- The total overall theme of the site (Sites that have a niche theme, are usually more authoritative in those niches then sites with broader themes)

- The theme of the sites linking to it (part of its link profile)

- The them of the sites its linking out to (another part of link profile)

- The trend in which it has gained links over time (link profile)

Those are just some of the factors that most SEO’s agree the search engines use to calculate authority.

Whats a good way to spot authority sites?

In addition to looking at the factors above, an easy way to see if a site is authoritative is to look at how it ranks for its own keywords.  If the site is trying to rank for a very tough keyword and it is ranking even half-way well then that would be a good sign of authority. If the site cant even rank for long strings of keywords that are unique to that particular site, then that is a sign that the site is does not have much authority

Hope this helps.