Majestic SEO Blog

Flow Metrics will change the way you look at links

Oh wow are we excited. We have been working on this for months… and months… and months.

Today, Majestic SEO are really proud to announce two new and significantly improved evaluation metrics, based on link data. For the first time, we are now able to use an iterative process – flowing through our link map – to give you easy to understand numbers (between 0-100) on how effective a URL is based on the flow of a characteristic through the web.

When we looked at the page and domain metrics in the industry today, we found PageRank faltering (and trademarked) and that really left the industry leader as MozRank. SEOMoz and MajesticSEO have a friendly rivalry – we push each other to do better. We therefore encourage you to compare our metrics with theirs. We think we just raised the bar.

Today we are launching two metrics – Trust flow and Citation flow. These form the initial pillars of our new flow metrics algorithm and can be applied to any URL, any sub domain or root domain. Together they give you new information about links and when you map all the Trust flow and Citation flow to a website, you also get a really cool chart showing the site’s link profile graphically!

I’ll tell you a bit more about how the flow metrics work in a bit – but let’s have a look at the charts. Every link to a site has a Trust flow value and a Citation flow value between 0 and 100. So every link nearly fits on a 100 X 100 grid. Links with high Citation flow end up more to the right… links with more Trust flow end up higher on the chart. Of course, many links could have the same scoring, so the density and colour of the chart helps to visualize these.

Here we are comparing two sites with quite respectable link profiles – Search Engine Watch vs Search Engine Land. Almost every link flow chart that you generate for a domain will tend to have this elliptical nature and we expect SEOs will debate for months to come on what each chart means, but from our perspective, the area where the colours get dense look to be highly significant .

Visually – these link graphs seem very appealing. So is this a trick of the stats? No – there are now many iterative algorithm calculations going on now during each index update, so that if a URL has a high Citation flow or Trust flow score, then proportionally more of that value will “flow” through to the links from that URL. Doing this once is cool. Iterating this loads of times is incredibly difficult – but we have cracked it and now we are able to give this to you instantly in all your reporting tools.

Flow Metrics Explained

To help visualise how flow metrics work, imagine a wave coming up onto a shore full of rock pools. You want to predict which rock pools are likely to have water in them. The wave comes crashing over the rocks and we know that the first pools will fill up. When they fill up, they spill out into neighbouring rock pools. Water can flow from several pools to fill up a rock pool a long way from the shore line… but eventually the water will dry up. If your rock is still dry… it’s not in the right place.

Graphically we can see what happens, by charting two flow metrics. Like fingerprints, we see the data come alive. Let’s look at a respected site like the BBC and then at a less dominant site like XL Pharmacy. The lower quality site not only has LESS links, but the areas where the colour is darkest seems to be much lower on the TRUST axis and much closer to the origin. We seem to see this pattern over and over again and by the end of this post we expect many of you to stop what you are doing and start looking at these patterns for your own sites as well.

What is the difference between Citation Flow and Trust Flow?

These two metrics have intrinsic differences, which is why the charts are not symmetrical.

Citation Flow

This flows our old metric – ACRank – making it much more accurate at predicting how influential a URL might be based on how many sites link to it. Because links are now not all created with equal weight – and because a strong link will have a relatively stronger influence on URLs further down the chain, you can see how much better Citation Flow is as a mathematical logic than the old metric of ACRank.

Trust Flow

We start with a large list on manually reviewed URLs. These have a crowd-sourced level of trust but by no means include all the trusted sites on the web. It turns out, though, that trustworthy sites tend to link to trustworthy neighbours. Those neighbours also tend to link to trustworthy neighbours themselves. In fact – after lots of iterations – those outside the circle of trust are put in the cold.  So Trust flow, like Citation flow passes THROUGH urls like sound passes through walls – with awesome effects.

In our tests, we see that most link profiles have better Citation flow than Trust flow – so if you see any sites with better Trust than Citation, we’d be interested in knowing about them as I am sure there will be more than one SEO starting to analyze these statistics.

Other cool things about these metrics:

1: We flow through internal links too

Bet you thought we didn’t care about internal links? Well although we don’t report on them, flow metrics do pass through internal links. This means a strong home page can influence the metrics of pages within its own site – although strong external links to inner pages will significantly boost a flow metric.

2: We aren’t using anyone else’s metric

We crawl the whole web. We’ll make our own decisions about what is and what isn’t “trustworthy” from now on. We think our way is better anyway.

3: They update every day

Every time our index updates, so do the flow metrics. For the Fresh Index, that means daily!

So how can you start using these new metrics?

We have built them in to our tools – from today. They will be in:

* Our bulk back-link checker tool – where we encourage you to compare en masse against anyone else’s metric.

* Our Site Explorer – where you can also see our new flow profile charts

* Our standard reports – so you can drill right down to the detail.

We hope you get as excited as we are and invite you to start analyzing our new flow metrics, comparing websites, comparing our metrics with the competition and giving us feedback. Please tread gently on our dreams, though. You would not believe the sleepless nights that Alex and Steve put into this work.

As of today we will be making the system live with the Fresh Index. We hope you like it!

New Launch Tech Teaser – Green Vs Red

Following Dixon’s earlier post, we’ve been impressed by the creativity of thought by some of the posters.

A few posters suggested the image in the previous post represented some manner of scatter plot – Linux Turner @ “localhost” suggesting an ACRank, backlink concentration chart indicating quality, Joost De Valk at Yoast suggesting a Distribution of websites/URLs over an AC rank / # links scale, and Jackie Hole suggesting a representation of the exodus of SEO professionals from a free bar when the drinks run out. Jackie, much though we love SEO related data, we have our limits…

We feel it only fair though, to provide a little clarity – so, I’m sorry Roland, from Cloudshapes – we can confirm that the new technology we are launching is in no way related to the genus sciurus, and whilst we appreciate the thought, Alex Flower, I guarantee the technology behind this is far, far more advanced than a simple IP addresses, AC Rank extract.

To attempt to explain the image above, without giving too much away, we generated a green flame for a big “thingy”, and fed some more data into our algorithm to generate a red flame for another big “thingame”. At a casual look, the two flames look pretty similar ( which won’t be a surprise to many when you learn what they represent ) – but when compared block by block, we see the subtle differences becoming more apparent.

Has this clarified your vision of what the new technology could be, or what the technology behind the “flame like scatter plot” could be – will it be the AC rank replacement loran750 has been dreaming of, or a link trajectory calculation as suggested by Brent Rangen?

Don’t forget to have a read of Brads’ Post if you fancy winning a two day pass to SearchMarketingDay at Poznan.

I’ll close by wishing you all a great weekend, with the promise that all will be revealed next week.

Oh… we should have said that ONE person more or less correctly guessed ONE axis in the initial post comments. One last clue is that the pixellation is there for a reason. Does this help? More guesses welcome below over the weekend.

Win a 2-day pass to Search Marketing Day, Poznan, Poland!

Majestic SEO have teamed up with SearchMarketingDay.com to provide one lucky Facebook fan with a free 2 day pass to Search Marketing Day in Poznan, Poland!

This awesome pass will not only get you into the largest SEO conference in Poland (22^nd May), gathering the world’s top SEO and SEM specialists, but also into all the SEO training workshops on the second day of the conference (23^rd May).

The competition is hosted over at Facebook.com/MajesticSEO, and is open to all, just as long as you can make it to the conference!

The competition closes at 12:00pm GMT Friday 18th May, and the winner will be drawn at random  and announced both via a blog post here shortly after.

Unfortunately, we can’t cover any expenses, such as travel or accommodation (as much as we’d love to!), so this competition is just for the pass itself. However, flights are really easy to get from all around Europe, and if you’re headed out there, be sure to catch up with our very own Dixon Jones who will be speaking on the 22nd, as well as revealing some fantastic new features Majestic SEO will be releasing soon!

So what are you waiting for? Head over to our Facebook page and get entering!

New Technology Launch from Majestic SEO

I wonder if anyone can guess what the chart on the right represents?

Is it a bird? (maybe a penguin?) is it a flame? (We hope to set the link building world alight.)

We would like to know what you imagine the chart represents by suggesting your thoughts and comments below.

Next week we will hit the road to launch these charts and the background technology – which will be entirely new from Majestic SEO. It is a technology we have been working on for some time. If you would like to get ahead of the game, you can start guessing here on the blog or come and meet us in person over the next few weeks.

We start in London at the start of the week for SMX where we have a stand. That’s where we will launch our new technology.

We will go straight from there up to Manchester, where we are at SASCon.

Then straight after the weekend I am off to Poznan in Poland for Search Marketing Day.

Try to guess right now and we’ll give you another clue in a few days. You can also make sure you get informed as soon as we are ready by making sure you have opted into our newsletter, which you can do from within your “my details” tab in your account settings (including free accounts).

Predict an Election in seconds by using Back Link Data

Election campaigns of recent years have had a huge digital focus, as nominees look to the internet to drive their campaigns to the widest possible audiences.

In the UK today, voters are going to the polls for local elections, with much of the media’s focus on the London Mayoral Candidacy.

Analysing the cumulative backlink data over the past month for the two leading candidates (The Conservative’s Boris Johnson, and Labour’s Ken Livingstone) election campaign websites shows an interesting tussle, with Boris Johnson’s ‘Back Boris’ website taking the lead following a recent surge in new links to the site.

In the 2008 US Presidential Elections, a record-breaking 46 per cent of Americans used the internet to get news about the campaigns, and Barack Obama’s focus on digital marketing has repeatedly been highlighted as one of the key factors that lead to his Presidential win.

With politicians the world over seeking to emulate Obama’s digital campaign success, and using their campaign website as the cornerstone of their marketing, could a look at the backlink data for upcoming elections across the globe highlight potential wins prior to the election results being published?

Interestingly, the final poll figures in the London elections match the lead found in the backlink data, with Boris set to head for victory in the race to be re-elected as Mayor with a six point win.

Key upcoming elections across the globe this year include the French Presidential elections, as well as the US Presidential elections. Looking at backlink data again over the past 30 days highlights Francois Hollande’s website taking a strong lead over Nicolas Sarkozy’s campaign platform.

Likewise, in the United States, Barack Obama appears to be surging ahead of Mitt Romney in terms of the number of backlinks directed at their campaign websites.

Whilst many factors of course play a part in each election across the planet,  a look at the backlink data is interesting, and highlights both the impact that the candidates are having across the web, but also the immensely hard work each campaign team must be putting into harnessing the internet as a key communications channel to the voters.