The talk about "not giving a fuck about metrics" is the most pathetic crap lately. The fact that you don't give a crap about metrics means, that you are unable to find a decent domain with both decent metrics and authority links. 75% of the domains that I scrape are duplicates of what I've already scraped in the past. 75%. I've raped the Internet basically. I scrape by keywords, which means, that the first domains which get scraped are what? Yes, authority domains! So most of the domains that I use have some kind of authority links PLUS they also have the metrics.
The authority sites that people here consider authority are like 5 in total? Huffpost, Engadget, Mashable and a few others. You really think you can find a good domain by scraping these sites still? Clean? I would really love to see that. The metrics aren't really a joke. RD isn't even a metric, that's basically a fact, it's not made up. Even though that TF on the domain can be high as fuck with only a few RD is true, yes, but that takes 5 seconds to see. If you have at least 20RD on the domain, it's hard for it to be an utter shit if it has at least some TF. The higher the RD, the harder it is to get a decent TF on the domain. If you have both, then the domain is good. Period. And you can be talking about not caring about metrics all you want. If I have 5 - 8 links on the 20RD domain, from domains with TF40+, then I would take that every day of my life over a domain which has one Huffpost link and only below average stuff there.
But let's get back to the OP. People want all kind of shit when it comes to metric. Few days back I got a request for, I quote, TF 10+ RD 10+ DR 35+ DA 15+ PA 20+. This is not an unreal request, but I could barely hold my shit together to be honest. Why the fuck do you need so many metrics to go by? You absolutely do not. Let's break them down.
DR - Really, either focus on Majestic or Ahrefs, don't use both. You will only limit the potential domains.
CF - If I get one more request for "High TF/CF" domain, I will kill myself. Same goes for "TF/CF ratio", because god... CF is an utter bullshit metric. When I see a PBN seller selling "High CF domains", I know he doesn't know shit about what he is selling. That should be a good filter for every newbie out there when he decides to buy links for the first time here in the Marketplace.
DA - Meh. It's good if it's higher, but the higher the RD, the higher the DA, so why bother about it? Still though, it's one of those less bullshit metrics.
RD - This is a "no-nonsense" metric. The RD is there, it's not made up, it's not some kind of algorithm, it's simply there, so yes, this is the one you should be focusing at.
TF - Of course, this is the second one that people should focus on. I explained earlier, that it can be "manipulated", but I would rather use the term "sketchy". The higher the RD, the less bullshit the TF becomes. If you have RD20+ and TF15+, you have a gold already. You will RARELY find even this kind of metrics nowadays. RD20+ TF9+ and I would go for it no problem. RD10+ TF14+ is similar in the terms of strenght and in terms of what you can find online, so I would go for these minimum, depending on your budget and so on.
Regarding which version of domains to use... well this is subjective. You either use one or the other, never mix them up. I've been using full URL to measure TF since forever. That's my personal prereference, it's subjective and using root may even be a better option, but I am so used to this, that I am not planning to change it. For RD determination I use the root. Is this the best technique? Hard to say. Google says that 301 redirect of the dead pages to homepage is considered a weak meta refresh basically. I honestly do not believe this. Google is often full of shit and my experience tells otherwise. Sure, it's better to have the domains pointing straight to homepage, but I wouldn't throw away a good domain just because most of the links point to internal pages. In that case you can still recreate them after all.
Hiring a VA for filtering your domains is the biggest bullshit you can do. Unless you have at least a few weeks/months experience in analyzing domains, then you will get screwed and register shittons of penalized stuff. To this date, I am still filtering my domains myself. It's a fuckin monkey work, but well worth it. Hiring some no-fuckin-idea-what-I-am-doing lazy guys who don't know crap about this is a terrible, terrible idea. And for basic filtering you can use Majestic bulk uploader, where you can sort it by metrics and take it from there. I would love to see a VA, who would filter 500K domains a week for me by hand.
And about niche relevancy. Overrated imo. If you go for niche relevancy, you will in 98% of the cases sacrifice metrics. If you want both niche relevancy and brutal metrics, go to the auctions. Trying to scrape niche relevant domain on purpose is tough shit and it takes ages and if you want something really powerful, you won't find it. Would you rather take non relevant TF10 RD20 or niche relevant TF5 RD10? I know what I would take.
Ok this was long, hope I didn't offend anyone, I am really hungry and tired and easily agitated, should get something to eat now...
