 Happy Friday Mars fans and today's Whitewood Friday is about measuring Limb building. So obviously this is a very big and very old topic in the SEO space and it's one that Mars as a company is heavily invested in right like Domain Authority and Page Authority are two Very popular products of ours, which are commonly used for this exact purpose Now this isn't going to be an editorial though I could stand here and just say you know Obviously these are best metrics in the world and that can think that's not what I'm here to do I'm here to tell you give you a bit of nuance about how and when to use these metrics and how to think about them and How to use them alongside other metrics as well rather than just having one tool and seeing it as a solution to all problems Which isn't necessarily fair. So to do that. I'm actually going to start by going right back to 1998 and Google's pay-drank model now I know that a lot has changed since 1998 both with the world and with Google but This was Google's original way of thinking about Links and in a lot of ways. It's still the best that we have to to go on and a lot of current SEO best practices and dogma are still based on This original understanding except there are a few things we sort of picked up along the way that don't really have a basis in anything That Google has said or or done which is part of why I want to sort of put them out. So Page rank originally was a way of using links to estimate the probability that a user is on a page And that's already quite interesting, right? That's because that shows that this is a model that is about Popularity so we when we talk about this now we often talk about things like, you know trust and Authority and this kind of thing and I'm sure those are relevant But it's worth remembering that originally this was just a way of estimating effectively the popularity of the page I know that I said of a page as well not even a domain So imagine a world where there's one page on the internet, which is page A that I've labeled here Now if there's one page on the internet, it's not that hard to estimate the chance that a random browser is on that page, right? It's a certainty. They're on that page if we introduce a second page It's still not that hard And we just assume it's going to be a 5050 and so on and so forth and that's sort of the baseline probability that we have to work with but then we can take a sort of Bit of a tangent or bit of a bit of a spice added to the situation When one page links to another and that's obviously what we're actually interested in so If a links to this second page and at the moment, there's still only two pages on the internet ignore these other boxes They'll come in later There's only two pages on the internet and a links the second page We say that naught point eight five times this probability is passed on Now naught point eight five is a fairly arbitrary sort of constant. It's one that comes from an old Google Document that it probably isn't that exact value, but it's it's fine for illustrative purposes, and it's the best we've got to go on so in this case Well, why have we said not one eight five by the way Why haven't we said the all why haven't we said that all of the users on this page click through well That's because we assume that some of them are going to You know go and do their own thing stop browsing the internet do something else And it turns out this dampening factor is quite important in a world where pages do actually link to each other in a big web rather than just one Link in one direction So that's all well. I'm good, right What if we had a Second link and introduced a third page to the internet. So this is still a very simplistic Model right. We've got an internet with three pages and two links and the links only go in one direction This is very very simple, but in this case we say We can't have both of these pages getting the full probability No, the users aren't clinging through to both they're clinging through to one of them. So That gets half of naught point eight five eight But then this one does too So in this simple version again in more complex model We might say oh one of these links is more like to be clicked on so it gets more probability or something like that But in this simple version, we're saying it's split two ways now in this case we've already learned something interesting again because By adding another link we've reduced the value of the existing links And that's something that we hardly ever think about in a link building context, right? But that is sort of what we're thinking about when in technical SEO conversations We talk about not having too many links in the top nav and this kind of thing, right? We're trying to focus our Strength where we most want it and then lastly, I promise the algebra will stop soon Lastly, what if we had another jump in this system? Well in this case This this not one eight five this dampening happens again So not one eight five times not one eight five is about naught point seven two. So it's less So it's it's basically it's not one eight five times this page above it And so it's got an even lower and this is this is why as technical SEO is sometimes we get caught up with Things like chain redirects and this kind of thing. Well, I think that's important. That's where that sort of dogma comes from so I'm not gonna go any further with this sort of simplified page rank explanation what I am trying to draw to your attention here is a few things one is That there's a lot about the specifics of a page here that affects the value of these links like the number of links that the page sent outwards and Also things like What this page were what linked to the specific page note that I didn't say anything about domains here This could be on four different domains. It could be on one domain We only talked about page specifics here And Google has been a little bit ambiguous over time in terms of how they think about pages versus domains But broadly speaking they say they care about pages not domains. So that's interesting, right? Because we could have these can all be on the same domain conceivably and yet this page Could potentially be a lot weaker and pass on a lot less strength than this one So that's interesting and that's something we don't normally think about with with link building. So If we bring this back on topic to what I said, I was going to talk about Actual metrics for link building. There are a few qualities that we're looking for, right? Now what I haven't just talked about is this that these first two we do want metrics that are fast We want it to be available as quickly as possible so we can report to our clients or a boss or that kind of thing And also just just with busy people. We don't waste our time We want metrics that ubiquitous. So when I do say to To my boss. Oh, you know, I've got you a link which had DA 90 There's a good chance that he or she or they know what that means Whereas if I say it had, you know A Tom Kappa score of 38 B, they're gonna say what are you talking about? So I do I do need to use a metric that's reasonably well understood But then there's this page and link level specifics that I just talked about. So if I think about a metric like Domain authority it does very well on these first two and it does okay on this third one because it has it is Trained on on rankings to some degree, but it's answering which is some of what this is determining, right? So there's some some benefit there and it does take into account some of this stuff But ultimately it's the main level metric. So it has to treat all the pages on one domain equally by definition And that has its that that produces some pros and cons. So what I want to do is I want to Put some metrics on a chart like this and suggest how you might use them alongside each other. So I've got Actual as the vertical axis here. So the closer it is to what we're actually trying to measure, which is Google's view of the value of the link basically the further up it's going to be but I've also got this fast slow sort of convenience metric So a metric like domain authority is probably somewhere here, right? It's very fast It's very ubiquitous But it's missing some of this nuance because it's a domain level metric and it's answering a slightly different question It's answering the question that DA is designed to answer the question How likely is a page on this domain all things being equal to rank well and that's a slightly different question to how valuable is there link? But if I'm saying I want DA but not necessarily domain level You might say oh well Mars has a metric for that and you should know and it's called page authority Well, yeah, that is a good candidate So like most page-level metrics in the industry including Google's and including our own page authority is initially informed by some By some page level by some domain level factors as well as page level factors But it is if you're done correlation studies and this kind of thing It is a lot closer to measuring the value and ranking potential of a specific page Than the domain authority is as you'd expect right because it's it's a more precise metric and it is capturing some of this nuance But I actually think you can go a step further with this as well Now page authority is a bit slower than domain authority because you have to wait for Mars to discover and call the page And we do our best, but it's not instant However, there are if you're willing to wait even longer than that You could use a metric like referral traffic Apologies might absolutely awful Writing that so with referral traffic. What we're what we're interested in is How many people actually click through from the link that I've built to my site and that's interesting because that's what Google was Actually trying to measure in the first place, right? So if we can measure that then we're getting pretty close to whatever they were aiming for so whatever sophistication They built in we thought of capturing that nuance now that has some And that's some obvious drawbacks What is that a lot of link building campaigns don't do very well on this metric and you can draw your own conclusions about that? The other is that you're also going to have to wait quite some time for this stage from available And even then there might be issues with the client's analytics or this kind of thing Anyway, that's what I wanted to share with you today And essentially what I what I would suggest is that you use all of these metrics and some others that you can Put yourself on this chart So I'm interested to hear what metrics you would use and where you would draw them on this kind of a chart And I put these green lines in a sort of a guide because I think you could do Sort of prospecting in this first section like before you've even built the link and then initial reporting to the client And then this section would more be after the campaign When you want to learn from it and think about what kind of links you would build in the future and whether you Would do the same thing again. Yeah, I'd love to hear your ideas. Thank you very much and happy Friday