Proof Metrics like TF Are a Complete Waste of Time

splishsplash said:
Majestic's TF has become a complete joke. It's gotten so useless that I don't bother to factor it into domain buying decisions even the slightest.

People really need to understand just how little they mean.

Just to really hit this point home..

There is a domain currently at auction.. It has 2 days left. Current bid is $5100.

Best TF? 15. TF on the root domain is 11 and http:// is 15. LOW. Very low. You'd think, uh it must be junk.


It has 5k backlinks from 960 RDs on Ahrefs(DR is also mostly junk, but a bit better btw)

It has

Forbes
nytimes
behance.net
techcrunch
washingtonpost
bloomberg
businessinsider
cnn
stripe
businessinsider.fr
entrepreneur.com
fastcompany.com
fortune.com
marriott.com
aol.com
buzzfeed
timeout.com
nymag.com
bostonglobe.com
news.com.au
uber.com

We are still at DR90+

You see just how utterly ridiculous TF is?

This domain is a monster. Anyone filtering TF20+ would miss this. Those customers of mine who demand only TF30+ domains would consider this a junk domain.

Moz's DA is actually ok. I don't recall ever seeing a DA < 40 on a monster domain. It's usually a good guideline, but within reason. A DA 23 could be better than a DA 35. You just usually won't see amazing domains with a DA less than 40, or good domains with a DA less than 15-18


And what about Ahrefs DR?

A DR40+ is almost always going to be good. It's reliable at the higher levels.

However.. It has labelled some very strong domains DR10-20. It's a bit skewed towards authority links.

It's great to have a bunch of DR80+ authority links, but a domain with 100+ really solid contextual links from DR10-70's is VERY good. I have a domain like that which is DR10, but it has dozens and dozens of links from mid-level sites. Real contextual links. This is what google looks for. I would rather have a domain with 50 contextuals from DR10-60 than 3-4 DR90+ contextuals. Of course, if you have both, then you have a killer domain.

Anyway..

As for this domain. I won't post it here, because someone is going to buy it, for a lot of money and it wouldn't be very pleasant if their domain was plastered on the public forum, but if anyone wants to see the auction page/url they can pm me and I'll disclose it in private. It just absolutely destroys any credibility TF has. I personally filter on TF7+ and the amount of powerful TF9-13 domains I find is crazy.
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Why you would do this? :( I enjoy how people missed great domains by looking for "TF 10/20/30+" for years. :D I started ignoring TF some years ago when a domain with 100 RDs from which 70 EDU, contextual good links, had 8 TF. like WTF Majestic? Same with topical TF. In way too many cases is so much off that is completely useless.

Now I am using them only to check for links and anchors Ahrefs may missed.
 
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well, I could be agree, but like every business, it depends of the target.
If you want to play with google this domain is good because it has good autority, but if you want to play by selling guest posting to people, they will check TF/DA....I'm not saying it's good, but 90% of those buyers will check these metrics, and it's the best way to sell guest posting and earn k$
 
splishsplash said:
I'll pm it to you. Not good to share in public. The forum is too big and it'll be permanently here. Imagine you just spent, $5k+ on a domain and found people talking about it here. I would be worried and pretty gutted.
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Thanks for sharing the info!

Let's analyze it a bit.

I would not be worried that the domain is worth a money site, a super-niche of food and recipes for example. It could rank for hundreds if not thousands of recipes in a glimpse with the proper on-page SEO, and can drive easily a couple of thousands visits per day. It's worth every single dollar of those $5K and it's a domain catch that it could be proudly shared in this forum for an extra nofollow backlink worth nothing :p

Be aware, that domain is a super domain. You are disregarding a lot of information, sticking exclusively to TF. These tools like Ahrefs, Majestics, and Moz, have their flaws. So they must be used in a fallback manner.

For example, since Majestic + Moz offers cheap metrics API, nowadays is weird to use one and not the other. This domain may have appeared in most users search because it has only an 11 TF BUT it has 57 DA
upload_2019-12-9_11-23-51.png

This is a green flag to go deeper into it immediately.
Next step is to check Ahrefs metrics straight away which are a little bit more costly due to a more expensive API

upload_2019-12-9_11-24-54.png

To see a DR 61!!!

So now it's easy to figure out that this is a super-domain and crawl a little bit more in the linking profile to see that is a highly worthy opportunity

Moral: Never stick to just 1 metric. Nowadays domain hunt analysis must be done from a multi-variable perspective.

I've also seen the opposite: 10 DA and 40 TF (despite that DA is a little bit more relaxed metric, generally tends to grow faster than TF).

So TF, from my POV is still highly useful as a fallback metric.

And if you can also see the DR with a Ahrefs metrics, you will be highly efficient when searching for domains although I feel their metrics are too expensive and hardly anyone could be willing to go for the extra investment. 95% of the time TF and DA will be complementing adequately, and APIs like domdetailer nail this.

I wondering what other users think about this. This is always an interesting topic.
 
I don't know anything about backlinks for PBN and this is the most useful thing I have found about it after searching for the last few days, thank you.
 
SirLouen said:
Thanks for sharing the info!
And if you can also see the DR with a Ahrefs metrics, you will be highly efficient when searching for domains although I feel their metrics are too expensive and hardly anyone could be willing to go for the extra investment. 95% of the time TF and DA will be complementing adequately, and APIs like domdetailer nail this.
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You use ahrefs because their backlink index is the best, not to check DR (also bulk checking DR is pain in the ass without another tools like netpeak).
 
AngelSeo said:
You use ahrefs because their backlink index is the best, not to check DR (also bulk checking DR is pain in the ass without another tools like netpeak).
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The thing is that if you have like 2,5K from a scrape, checking profile one by one is impossible. If you rely on TF solely, you may miss, as the OP has suggested, some great domains that are on 10 TF incidentally.

If you rely on DA more of the same. But if you cross both you minimize the issues. Ultimately having DR in the equation, could be a deal breaker, but at least for me it's too expensive, and marginally worthy. Maybe 1 diamond could be worth thousands of Ahrefs checks, but so far, I could not justify it. Also when checking like a high DA domain (+30) and a very low TF (<5) I tend to check DR with a quick query in Ahrefs, and if the DR is like <5 is skip the linking profile check.

I think that ultimately most users that have been wandering for a while have their own heuristics.
 
Nice case study. But Majestic indexing power is high compared to other tools. I mean, backlinks indexing
 
Past few months onwards, I have noticed this issue and stop using this metric (TF/CF).
I really don’t want to follow anymore.

Currently, I started to consider Ahrefs and MOZ metrics.
 
I wish someone would tell us what best to use

domdetailer , semrush, ahreff, moz

getting very expensive this chat.

majestic out the window .
 
SirLouen said:
The thing is that if you have like 2,5K from a scrape, checking profile one by one is impossible. If you rely on TF solely, you may miss, as the OP has suggested, some great domains that are on 10 TF incidentally.

If you rely on DA more of the same. But if you cross both you minimize the issues. Ultimately having DR in the equation, could be a deal breaker, but at least for me it's too expensive, and marginally worthy. Maybe 1 diamond could be worth thousands of Ahrefs checks, but so far, I could not justify it. Also when checking like a high DA domain (+30) and a very low TF (<5) I tend to check DR with a quick query in Ahrefs, and if the DR is like <5 is skip the linking profile check.

I think that ultimately most users that have been wandering for a while have their own heuristics.
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Well if you want good domains you have to check the link profiles individually. What I do is put the domains 200 by 200 in Ahrefs, and look for DR/RD ratio -> for example 5 DR and 30 RD is quite normal, the domain is worth checking, but 2 DR with 200 RDs means fuckton low quality links and not worth even taking a look. So from 2500 scraped domains I will check 100-150 at most.
Big SEO said:
Nice case study. But Majestic indexing power is high compared to other tools. I mean, backlinks indexing
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Actually Ahrefs first, Moz second, Majestic third. Well Semrush is even worse. Try it with any domain, but do not forget to check Ahrefs recent/historical index as that is what Majestic is showing you in their "fresh" index.
 
AngelSeo said:
Well if you want good domains you have to check the link profiles individually. What I do is put the domains 200 by 200 in Ahrefs, and look for DR/RD ratio -> for example 5 DR and 30 RD is quite normal, the domain is worth checking, but 2 DR with 200 RDs means fuckton low quality links and not worth even taking a look. So from 2500 scraped domains I will check 100-150 at most.

Actually Ahrefs first, Moz second, Majestic third. Well Semrush is even worse. Try it with any domain, but do not forget to check Ahrefs recent/historical index as that is what Majestic is showing you in their "fresh" index.
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Yes. You are right.

Already Matthew woodward also shared his detailed case study on blog: https://www.matthewwoodward.co.uk/seo/tools/best-backlink-checker/
 
goflippa said:
Yes. You are right.

Already Matthew woodward also shared his detailed case study on blog: https://www.matthewwoodward.co.uk/seo/tools/best-backlink-checker/
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upload_2019-12-12_10-19-56.png

I pointed out the mistakes in his methodology in the comment section (before the update of the article), but my comment was not approved. So I was sure that he get paid by Semrush for this case study (as they was declared winner, and Ahrefs last, which is nonsense for anyone using all those). Seems that he update it after all, admitting that it was not done right. So I guess he did not sold his soul, after all.
 
AngelSeo said:
What I do is put the domains 200 by 200 in Ahrefs, and look for DR/RD ratio
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Do you have an Ahrefs Agency account? Ahrefs is good, but as not useful for me because it's too expensive/restrictive. For me at least, is the last bastion to see if I'm finally purchasing / bidding. But for bulk decissions, personally I can't make heuristics like that based on Ahrefs. The $500/mo API is still a lil bit expensive. I may consider it, only if I could make a business of the less quality domains to pay expenses.
 
SirLouen said:
Do you have an Ahrefs Agency account? Ahrefs is good, but as not useful for me because it's too expensive/restrictive. For me at least, is the last bastion to see if I'm finally purchasing / bidding. But for bulk decissions, personally I can't make heuristics like that based on Ahrefs. The $500/mo API is still a lil bit expensive. I may consider it, only if I could make a business of the less quality domains to pay expenses.
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You dont need the API :) Netpeak ($15/month) checker is using "open credits" - you just need to connect your Ahrefs account and voila 500k "open" credits..

edit: Ahrefs should start paying me dammit. I advertise them everywhere lol.
 
Well, in my limited experience that I have dabbled with SEO, domains and metrics, I have noticed the following:

TF categories does not matter for ranking for low competition keywords. But if you are going to rank for those short tail or even moderate competition keywords, TF matters. Why? Just do a research on the top ranking results for a highly competitive keyword and you will see that most of them have almost similar TF categories.

Please note, I did note mention TF scores though. TF scores can vary and you might rank for a competitive keyword with a TF score of 15 in the "right" categories even if the competing sites have over 50 in the same or almost similar categories. So how are you doing it? Through your DR being higher or almost equal to those sites.

In conclusion, for competitive keywords, the right categories matters but the TF score is not that important as your DR (that means your quality of backlinks).
 
splishsplash said:
This is how you assess a domain :-

1) Root domains. Ahrefs. Solid first indicator. 50-100, 100-200, 200-500, 500+. This is my initial grade. Doesn't mean much by its self, but the more RDs it has the better chance of there being more good links, and high RDs is a factor in ranking/domain strength.
2) Contextuals. DR20-80. How many actual, real contextual links does it have? Not just a page with a little content, but an article. 10-20? Decent. 10-20 contextuals, RD50, I'll take it. Entry level pbn domain. 50+ contextuals = EXCELLENT domain. 100+ contextuals = Gimme!
3) Contextuals: DR80+ These are bonuses. I don't value a domain based on these alone. Does it have 10-20 contextuals from DR20-80, but no DR80+'s? No problem. Still a solid little domain. If we have 2-3 DR80+ contextuals here, then it just improves what we already have from check 2. If it's got dozens of these like that one going for $5k, then it's a real monster.
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Hey.
I know you wrote it a long time ago but what about broken links? Ahrefs shows you a lot of backlinks to your targeted domain but many links are broken when you click on them. Do those broken links have any value even if they're from high RD sites?
 
Rardak said:
Hey.
I know you wrote it a long time ago but what about broken links? Ahrefs shows you a lot of backlinks to your targeted domain but many links are broken when you click on them. Do those broken links have any value even if they're from high RD sites?
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There's a ghost effect depending on how long ago the link was last seen.

Anything from 1 month to about 9 months for very old links.
 
splishsplash said:
There's a ghost effect depending on how long ago the link was last seen.

Anything from 1 month to about 9 months for very old links.
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Thank you. How about the links that do not lead to the "home page" (domain) but to the pages that no longer exist? The same case, right? The ghost effect? Isn't PA (home page) more important than DA then? I know those metrics are only a rough estimate but still...
 
Rardak said:
Thank you. How about the links that do not lead to the "home page" (domain) but to the pages that no longer exist? The same case, right? The ghost effect? Isn't PA (home page) more important than DA then? I know those metrics are only a rough estimate but still...
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I'm not sure what you mean.

Are you talking about the backlink being removed, or the page on your site being removed?
 
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