Any SEO experts who can tell how much URL Rating (UR) matters in link building?
Arttu Haho
11 replies
I've been doing link building recently and noticed that Domain Rating (DR) and Traffic seem to be factors that are used to evaluate how valuable certain backlinks are for your website. There is also UR so how much that affects the value of the back link. I'll give you an example:
Some page is backlinking to your web page. DR for the domain is 45 and Organic Traffic is 9,000 monthly visitors but the actual page linking to your page has UR of 9 and traffic is 200 monthly organic visitors.
I've noticed that DR and domain traffic are used generally to evaluate the value of the link but it would more logical to use UR and traffic of actually page to define how valuable the link is.
Replies
Georgi Mamajanyan@georgi_mamajanyan1
To be honest I never check page metrics when building backlinks.
I know agencies that check 20+ metrics of each backlink and provide shitty backlinks at the end of the day.
The main problem with those metrics is that they are not constructed (usually) by Google and even if you get 100 UR/DR backlinks it doesn't necessarily mean that it is worthy for google.
You need to understand how each metric is calculated and act accordingly.
In our agency, we build around 600 backlinks per month and the metrics that we care about are:
- The website should be a legit business, no news/magazine shitty website
Usually, news/magazine websites do a lot of black hat to win the competition which on a large scale can indirectly harm your website as well, in the case of SAAS or service websites they won't risk their domains to get to their short term goal, this is why SAAS/service backlinks provide more value then News/magazine ones, also in long term, each backlink would give more value as they usually invest in their SEO.
- Domain Rating
As DR is calculated by the backlinks provided to a certain domain, which makes sense, as we want to get a backlink from that website
- Ahrefs Traffic
Working with the same logic as Google Traffic Estimator it checks the keywords that the website ranks for, then search volume of each keyword, the exact SERP rank, and estimates CTR of each keyword, the SUM of all those factors is the ahrefs traffic that you will get.
We prefer using Ahrefs traffic rather than traffic calculators that count HTTP responses as we find ahrefs more reasonable for SEO result tracking.
- SSL certificate
Each website should have an SSL certificate
- Relevancy
This is one of the crucial factors but we need to understand that relevancy does NOT mean the whole website's tools or services need to be closely related to the website you are providing backlinks, it DOES mean that the context should be relevant.
Those metrics are enough to make sure the backlink would provide great value to your website.
Thanks for your time, hope this helps.
Also, you can schedule a call with me or any of my colleagues if you have questions through our agency website.
https://saynine.ai/
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@arttuhaho Sure in that scenario it will bring more value but the main problem companies have is trying to get perfect link which kills the growth hacking.
We can make the backlinks closer to the perfection or we can get relevant backlinks from legit websites and kill the competition that's the main reason we would rather ignore less important factors.
@georgi_mamajanyan1 Thanks Georgi for your great response and a comprehensive list of factors you consider in link building. Let's imagine a scenario that you are getting a link to your page from a website of legit business with DR 65. There must be a difference in the value of the link you are getting depending if it is coming from their home page or some other page that is 5 clicks away from the home page. In your list relevancy is the only factor that probably considers the difference between these two different situation and maybe traffic if you mean the traffic of the webpage instead of domain traffic. Do you think UR would bring additional value in this scenario to select which one of those two pages you would like link to your page?
@georgi_mamajanyan1 Thanks! That makes sense.
Hey @roberto_robles is this something you could help with?
@maxwellcdavis Technically it should matter, but when link building we usually focus on the referring domain and its metrics.
@maxwellcdavis @roberto_robles That is what I have noticed too but I believe there is a big difference if you get a link from the home page or somewhere that is 5 clicks away from the home page. So it feels that domain level metrics might be quite misleading and therefore also misused. Challenge is also that actually nobody knows what algorithms value, we only have enlightened guesses.
I think it does matter.
I would apply here Goodhart's Law: "When measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
URL Rating is a good measure in my opinion because very few actually use it as a metric for link building, so it is rarely "hacked or manipulated". Domain rating on the other hand is such a common measure that I think it has lost most of its validity.
If the Domain rating is not optimized/manipulated at all, it most likely still is a good measure (so you havent done any link building that tries to drive up DR), but unfortunately sites you will get links from will mostly have done something to increase their DR.
@aleksi_halsas1 Are you saying that you would trust more UR and page level metrics than domain level metrics when evaluating the value of a backlink? Or can you even keep it this simple?
@arttuhaho It is maybe a bit over simplified to say that, but if I would have to choose one, I would choose page level so UR
@aleksi_halsas1 THanks for your input! Maybe, I start paying more attention to page level metrics too.