In our latest episode of TheeDigital’s podcast, Keri and Christopher discussed common SEO myths with special guest, Patrick Stox. From the importance of backlinks to the existence of site authority, the discussion covered best practices and surprising truths about search engine optimization.
So watch the video, listen to the podcast, or read the transcript below and separate SEO fact from fiction to help you optimize your website for success.
Key Takeaways
- Backlinks are still relevant and can impact rankings.
- There is no optimal keyword density; keyword usage should be natural and relevant.
- Redirects do not lose value and can be used effectively.
- Click-through rate is not a direct ranking factor, but it can indirectly influence rankings.
- The choice between subdomains and subdirectories depends on the specific website and its structure.
- Social signals may indirectly impact SEO by increasing visibility and potentially generating additional links.
- The existence of a sandbox for new websites is debatable.
- Domain authority is not a direct ranking factor, but site authority may be used by Google for quality assessment.
- Common SEO myths should be critically evaluated and tested to determine their validity.
- 1Backlinks Are No Longer Relevant
- 2There Is An Optimal Keyword Density
- 3Redirects Lose Value
- 4Click Through Rate Is Used In Ranking
- 5Subdirectories Are Better Than Subdomains
- 6Duplicate Content Penalty Is Real
- 7The Sandbox Exists
- 8Google Analytics Helps You Rank Better
- 9Linking Out To Other Sites Is Bad
- 10Social Signals Affect SEO
- 11Domain Authority Is A Ranking Factor
Introduction
Keri Rosemond (00:00)
Hello everyone and welcome to TheeDigital’s Growth Cast. I’m Keri Rosemond and today we have Patrick Stox and Christopher Lara joining us to talk about Common SEO Myths. Patrick is a Product Advisor and Technical SEO at Ahrefs and Christopher is the SEO Marketing Manager at EF Go Ahead Tours.
Christopher Lara (00:20)
Thank you, Keri
Patrick Stox (00:22)
Hey everyone, thanks for having me.
Keri Rosemond (00:23)
So glad to have you here.
Patrick Stox (00:26)
My pleasure.
Backlinks Are No Longer Relevant – Myth or Not?
Christopher Lara (00:27)
So Keri if it’s alright with you, I will kick us off and kind of go over the first SEO myth and see what Patrick thinks. So Patrick, SEO myth or not, our backlinks are no longer relevant.
Patrick Stox (00:41)
Being at Ahrefs I’m going to go with that’s a big myth. Actually, I did some testing on that because there was a whole trend of everyone saying links don’t matter anymore. And I think Google is even downplaying that. But I literally took some posts. I disavowed all the links to them, and they dropped. It hurt the rankings. So I think it’s still relevant. Pretty easy to prove that.
And now with Gen .ai for the content, I think they’ll probably be even more relevant in the future. That’s one of the ways that they can actually differentiate, is this a good page or not, rather than which one of these 1 ,000 Gen .ai pages should I actually rank?
Christopher Lara (01:25)
Yeah, I agree everything I’ve seen. Yeah, links still relevant. I don’t really understand the argument that they’re not to your point. It’s so easy to prove you have page that’s not ranking at all. Get some nice quality links and traffic comes comes.
Keri Rosemond (01:43)
And maybe that’s the difference. Now it’s more important that they’re quality links now that Google is smarter and you can’t just get a bunch of toxic links that will actually hurt you now, I believe.
Patrick Stox (01:56)
Yeah, generally anything that SEO tools would mark as toxic. Google is going to ignore the bad links. But those toxic markers and tools are kind of like iffy anyway. They’re really all bad links. So I’ve seen some people shoot themselves in the foot disavowing. Just like trusting the tools without a review and then hurting themselves, basically. And it’s not great. I think the…
Keri Rosemond (02:13)
Really?
Patrick Stox (02:22)
The disavow tool is probably going to go away because of stuff like that.
Christopher Lara (02:26)
Yeah, yeah, I think Bing already got rid of theirs and I think Google has said they’re planning on getting rid of theirs eventually as well.
Keri Rosemond (02:26)
Interesting.
Patrick Stox (02:33)
Yeah.
There Is An Optimal Keyword Density – Myth or Not?
Christopher Lara (02:34)
All right, that brings us to our next myth or not. The idea that there is an optimal keyword density or a percentage that boosts page ranking.
Patrick Stox (02:43)
It’s pi, obviously, 3.14%. No. Wow, that’s an old myth. You don’t typically hear what’s the… It’s not entirely wrong. I mean, obviously, it’s way more than just the density for one particular keyword, but it is one of those things where when Google’s pulling a query,
Christopher Lara (02:45)
you
People still believe that.
Patrick Stox (03:09)
That is something they’re gonna measure like how many times is this term mentioned relevant terms mentioned? That goes into like their initial scoring system But no, it’s not like, you know, if you say this exactly 17 times or something you’re gonna rank better But there there potentially is a very minimal boost by saying something more than once other than you know But I it’s overblown I think by far
Christopher Lara (03:37)
Yeah, agreed. I mean, obviously, whatever you’re writing about, you need to mention it and you need to use the language that people who are searching for it would use. But beyond that, I wouldn’t really stress about hitting any kind of magical number as well.
Patrick Stox (03:53)
Well, I mean, that’s kind of a fun point too, actually. Like you don’t necessarily even have to say the word. If you say like a variation or a synonym of it, like they’re still going to pick up on it. So what word is the one word that you want to have the keyword Ditsidy for? Like it doesn’t really work that way.
Redirects Lose Value – Myth or Not?
Christopher Lara (04:11)
Next, myth or not redirects lose value. So the idea being that if you’re getting some amount of value from a backlink to page, then you redirect to another page, that some of that link juice is lost. If they’re not.
Patrick Stox (04:28)
Yeah, I’m going to go with myth. I think that actually used to be the case. Like there was this whole thing where like they would lose. I think people assumed it was the amount that was like deprecated from page rank, which was like 15%. And then there’s a lot of redirects where people think like even still that they don’t actually pass value. They’re like a 302 doesn’t pass any value. I think that’s still in some of the popular starter guides out there. Definitely not the Ahrefs ones.
But like, no, like the value goes one place or another. It’s, if you redirect, like that’s one of the canonicalization signals. So whichever page actually gets indexed is generally going to be the one where all the value goes to now. Like there’s no, there’s nothing that prevents any of the value from being passed unless like you block something and they can’t see the redirect or something like that.
Christopher Lara (05:25)
Have you guys seen anything about utilizing a 308 versus utilizing a 301 redirect and an argument for why 308 would be better?
Patrick Stox (05:36)
It’s not better. It’s basically the same as the 301. So all it does is prevent it from swapping get to post, post to get. But there’s a little bit of a trade -off in this system. Technically, it’s a better version of a 301 because it prevents that. But then it’s not necessarily as widely supported as a 301. But that probably will be fixed within a year or two, I would think.
Christopher Lara (05:41)
That’s what I thought.
Patrick Stox (06:03)
But I have no problem with someone using either one right now.
Christopher Lara (06:07)
I got a follow up question because if I remember correctly, Patrick, you did a study on this. When we put in a redirect, how long should we keep it?
Patrick Stox (06:17)
According to Google, at least a year. And yeah, the study I ran basically, like I just removed redirects. And I mean, ones that had literally like hundreds of referring domains that were relevant. Like basically we had a newer version of a blog. We redirected it. And yeah, the consensus I think for the SEO community in the past was like, don’t do that. And it still scares me. I don’t want to do that. I want to keep my redirects because…
What if a user has this bookmarked or something? I still want them to go there. But yeah, when I deleted them for those pages, nothing happened. And that kind of went against the conventional wisdom. It’s what Google has been telling us, but I don’t think anyone really believed it.
Christopher Lara (07:01)
I’m guilty of keeping them forever.
Patrick Stox (07:03)
Yeah, I’ll keep them as long as I can anyway. But yeah, I think for the most part, at least for the value, you’re fine if you delete them after a year. There are other reasons not to delete them, though. So yes, keep them.
Keri Rosemond (07:17)
And a reason why somebody would want to delete them, correct me if I’m wrong, is if you have thousands of redirects and you want to clean them up because at some point the server, at least some of our vendors have said you can’t have more than 1 ,000 or 2 ,000. What are your thoughts on that?
Patrick Stox (07:34)
Yeah, that’s still a small amount to, like I’ve actually done some tests, you know, on how long it takes redirects to fire in a bunch of systems. Like how long does that processing take? And for the most part, it’s like 0 .03, 0 .06 seconds, or like in a lot of systems, it’s like 0 .005 seconds. Like it’s basically nothing. It’s, yeah, it’s…
At some point, the file, I think it’s unwieldy to manage. And yeah, it’s still legacy belief that like, you got a bunch of redirects is going to slow down the processing. Not unless you’re like hosting on a potato box or something these days. Like even a shared host like fired them in a fraction of a second. And that’s, that’s like a $3 a month account that I have like 30 some sites hosted on.
so it’s not something I would like be worried about. Maybe you hit hundreds of thousands and millions of redirects, but a few thousand, like I would never worry about that.
Keri Rosemond (08:38)
Good to know, thanks.
Christopher Lara (08:40)
I’m really interested in your take on this next one because I have an opinion and experience of it and I wonder if you’re gonna have an opposite experience. Myth or not, click -through rate is used in ranking.
Click Through Rate Is Used In Ranking – Myth or Not?
Patrick Stox (08:55)
That’s a very controversial one right now.
Christopher Lara (09:00)
Well, in Google’s, in the antitrust lawsuit against Google by the US government, wasn’t there that slide in which they explained how click -through rates kind of aren’t used maybe in the initial ranking, but kind of help the feedback loop to kind of decide whether content should be where it is?
Patrick Stox (09:24)
Yeah, that’s, that’s what I was, I was starting to think like how I can explain that, like use directly in rankings as like a ranking factor or something. no, but the system that’s mentioned on that slide is nav boost. And at least the way that I understand it, it’s not that like you go click on, this one website a bunch of times is going to be ranked higher. I mean, like, okay, so that can happen. Like Rand Fishkin proved that with a test.
Christopher Lara (09:39)
Yeah.
Patrick Stox (09:53)
but only for like temporary things. Like usually within a day, the results are back to where they were. So something’s trending or something like that. Yes. But in general, it’s not like you go click this or like it’s got a bunch more clicks than the one above it and it’s suddenly going to rank higher. It’s more that they use all that click through data to look and say like, what overall like makes this a better result? Maybe,
this matches to something a little better. This has a certain feature that it matches to on the website or something like that. And so it’s not the individual clicks to an individual page. It’s like aggregated clicks to all the things that they’re like, what makes a better result, which one should actually rank higher. And that can kind of boost it, but it’s not like go click this, it ranks higher. Does that make sense?
Christopher Lara (10:44)
saw Rand Fishkin’s talk and yeah, his proof, proving that it does influence ranking temporarily. People would say the latest Google leak, you know, would help support that they do use click -through rate data a lot. But you’re saying in your opinion, it’s kind of like a temporary.
Patrick Stox (11:07)
it’s again, the nav boost system, it’s basically a model that’s trained on all the click data, but it’s not like saying look up how many clicks went to this page. If it’s more, they go to that one, like boost that up. like if more, more people are clicking results seven, then result three is not, they’re like move seven up to three. It’s, it’s more like, okay, like why are more people clicking on this one? And then they go look and they match that to maybe, it’s.
topicality is better, like it covered the topic better, or like people just like that brand better, or maybe it’s a tool that has a certain feature that the other tools don’t have, so it’s more popular. So they kind of look at that kind of stuff across the board, and they’re like, well, like why is it better? And then they try and say like, well, let’s boost the ones that we think would be better overall, not the individual page.
Christopher Lara (12:00)
So can we say that it influences ranking?
Patrick Stox (12:06)
I mean, obviously like the data is used, but not the individual data for an individual page. And that’s, I think my take on that is, yeah, everyone’s convinced if I just go have me and all my friends go click on this, or I set up some click bots, some networks, like people have tried this for years. I literally did an old experiment using the Tor network. Like I set up, I literally was automating clicks and I was doing,
like not just the searches that I was targeting, but other searches and entire sessions and typical user behavior, clicking multiple things. Like I tried to gain this in a number of ways and there’s no impact. I know a few others, Russ Jones had done that. He used the residential proxies when he tried it. I’ve known probably a dozen SEOs run experiments like this and you’ve never seen one published because they never worked.
Christopher Lara (12:56)
Yeah.
Gotcha. All right. So I have also tried this. And I just assumed I wasn’t doing a good job of it. But yeah, okay. So maybe, maybe.
Patrick Stox (13:10)
I think we all kind of thought that, we tried a bunch of things and we’re like, I don’t know, like something doesn’t add up.
Christopher Lara (13:13)
Yeah, yeah, I’m trying to help. All right. All right. Okay.
Subdirectories Are Better Than Subdomains – Myth or Not?
Patrick, myth or not, subdirectories are better than subdomains for ranking.
Patrick Stox (13:25)
you’re gonna get me in trouble on this one. I think I’m against most of the SEO community on this.
Christopher Lara (13:32)
My whole goal in this talk is to get you in trouble.
Patrick Stox (13:35)
So it’s funny because like Google is like, no, like they’re basically the same use whatever one you want. It’s even in the documentation and SEOs just don’t believe this. And I’m going to go with an SEO answer. It depends on this one. So if you have a sub domain and it’s not really treated as part of the website,
It can’t really make the connections and have the same signals. Whereas in most cases, a subdirectory would be connected, but really like there’s exceptions. So I think people don’t see this, but like I see data from all over the world. We have, or actually I can think of a US example. So like medium .com. Do you think every blog that’s on medium, every user account there gets its own sub direct or sub sub directory? Whereas on typical like.
Blogspot, Blogger, all the WordPress, it’s been subdomains. So everyone got used to subdomains. They don’t inherit the value of the main domain. But it’s the same with subdirectories at times. So medium, there’s tons of sites in Japan where they actually have the user as a subdirectory. They’re not going to magically inherit the signals from the main site. They’re not really that connected. So it just depends on how the site is built.
I I’ve literally written about this and I make the argument like, why are you going to spend time like moving to the sub direct or sub domain to like a sub directory and then have to redo all your linking and blah, blah, blah. When, if you just redid that linking and made those connections better, like it’s going to tie the site together and you should get those signals. Like everything should get connected and you should be able to inherit those signals.
Keri Rosemond (15:26)
we’re talking about the difference between blog.theedigital.com and theedigital.com/blog. Where do you put the blog? Is it a subdirectory? You know, in WordPress, it’s all the same. It’s not technically a subdirectory, but you in the URL structure, it looks like it’s on directory, right? That’s what we’re talking about.
Patrick Stox (15:44)
Yeah. Well, that’s the other thing. It’s all like virtual anyway. Like it’s not a real file system anymore.
Keri Rosemond (15:51)
Yeah.
I always thought a subdomain is its own web property, doesn’t inherit anything from the main site. But if it is, theedigital.com/blog that is the same site, so it inherit, so it’s all the same property.
Patrick Stox (16:08)
say, TheeDigital’s the blog to a subdomain and you didn’t change any of the internal linking, it’s still connected the same way. And it should still have all the same signals. And I literally have looked at this across probably thousands of websites where people have moved both ways. And as long as things didn’t change, it’s basically treated the same way.
now it’s, it’s more likely, I think, to be treated, as part of the main site, if it’s in a, a sub directory. So I’ll tell people do that if you can, but if it’s easier to do a sub domain and you’re willing to do internal linking and, and that kind of stuff between the two, there should be no difference really.
Keri Rosemond (16:36)
So as long as.
OK, so this use case could be if a client came to us with a site that didn’t already have a blog and maybe it’s a custom static coded PHP site or something and they just wanted to add a blog using WordPress, We could add WordPress to a sub domain and let them manage their own blog.
And as long as they do internal linking both ways between the main site and the blog posts, it should acquire some of the same worth as the main site. interesting.
Patrick Stox (17:26)
Yeah, exactly. It’s if you treat it as part of the same site, like Google is going to learn and treat it as part of the same site, which is exactly what they tell people. But for some reason, SEOs don’t want to believe that.
Keri Rosemond (17:35)
Okay.
Okay, thanks. That could come in handy for someone who wants to add a shop to like a simple shop and they don’t want to mess with their main site and they just want to like install Shopify or something separately. Yeah.
Patrick Stox (17:51)
Yeah, sometimes it’s just easier on a sub domain and like, yeah, if it’s easier, but like, you still kind of have to do some work to make those connections, like have them, you know, in the menu and the footer internally linked that kind of stuff. And, but yeah, if you’re treating it as one, like there’s no reason for Google not to treat it as one, whereas there are plenty of examples like medium where like, they’re not going to treat all the blogs on medium is the same website because they’re not like it. They’re just not going to do that. Otherwise literally everyone would be using medium for parasite SEO and I don’t really see that happening.
Duplicate Content Penalty Is Real – Myth or Not?
Christopher Lara (18:24)
All right, myth or not, duplicate content penalty is real.
Patrick Stox (18:30)
False, yeah, complete myth.
Keri Rosemond (18:32)
Wait, duplicate content is not bad? Is that what you’re saying?
Patrick Stox (18:37)
Generally, no, it’s just gonna be ignored.
exception would be like if a domain is like just copying content from another domain all the time, like they might get an actual penalty, but generally that’s going to be a manual penalty, not anything algorithmic. It doesn’t really hurt. It just doesn’t really like help you. So you got a hundred location pages and you decide to use the same company description, that same boilerplate text, totally fine.
not necessarily going to help you on a per page level, but like not going to hurt you, not going to really impact anything. I wouldn’t want someone to be rewriting that a hundred times either. They’ve got a hundred locations.
Keri Rosemond (19:20)
Did you say it would ignore it though? that’s a great example, like for location pages, does that mean none of the location pages will rank if they don’t have unique content or it just.
Patrick Stox (19:30)
No. So in fact, there’s like tons of people do it where they just pretty much change the city name and it’s still ranking. You’re not really supposed to do that, though. Those are considered, I think, doorway pages by Google. But I see them ranking all the time. So very minimal effort, change city name. Not that I’m recommending that. But you can add value to the pages by having more than, you know,
Keri Rosemond (19:47)
Okay.
Patrick Stox (19:57)
changing the description or whatever, but big, big corporations all the time. Like you go to the McDonald’s locations or whatever their pages, it’s literally like the same page on a thousand different times. Basically they changed the address and blah, blah, blah. And that’s it.
Christopher Lara (20:12)
Well, I wouldn’t worry about duplicated content on my own site. One area where I’ve been disappointed with Google Search recently is of syndicated content. And just them showing the, like almost every other site except for the original site.
Patrick Stox (20:31)
Yeah, they’ve changed the guidelines around that now. Like it used to be they recommended like put a link to it and add a canonical like back to the original, but like people didn’t necessarily do that. And now I think they’re saying like just don’t have the other page indexed period.
Christopher Lara (20:45)
Yeah.
don’t have the same thing. Yeah.
Patrick Stox (20:53)
So like if you’re syndicating the content, like you shouldn’t be doing it for traffic and for ranking and stuff. And there’s a lot of sites, Yahoo is probably the big abuser of this where their stuff ranks over the original for a lot of news articles. And I’m pretty sure that’s intentional. Like I doubt if these publishers tried to be like, Yahoo, you need to like no index your stuff. Yahoo is going to be like, okay, I’m going to do that. Like then what’s in it for them.
And it should be like, well, they still get these articles for their users, but really they get more users by having it ranking in search results. So it’s not something I think that they want to do.
The Sandbox Exists – Myth or Not?
Christopher Lara (21:32)
All right, myth or not, the sandbox exists. I’m curious what you say now, given the most recent document leak by Google. Some people feel strongly that this proves the sandbox exists.
Patrick Stox (21:47)
Haha, what?
Okay, so in the link, there is a mention of sandbox, but it’s literally, the description for that is like sandboxing new link spam or something. I can’t remember the exact words. So it’s got literally a purpose for it. Whereas the way SEOs think of sandbox is like new website can’t rank. And I don’t understand how they jump to…
that they jumped to this conclusion that that is a thing that that version of the sandbox where new sites can’t rank exists because they have this mention of sandbox that’s about like fresh link spam. And I’m like, wait, what? How did they get there?
Christopher Lara (22:33)
Yeah, I don’t understand how to get there. The sandbox exists. I think if you have a new site and you get a bunch of great backlinks and you’re producing good content, then you’re gonna start seeing traffic. Doesn’t matter if you’re new. I think if you produce a new website and just leave it there and no one knows about it, you’re not gonna get traffic.
Patrick Stox (22:52)
Yeah. I’m surprised this is even a thing. And you just gave me a good idea for a study because I can very easily look at like newly registered domains and see who’s ranking within the first, you know, few days, few weeks and, and disprove this. Like we have the data for that. So that’s actually a pretty easy thing to pull.
Christopher Lara (23:13)
Cool, I look forward to reading it.
Google Analytics Helps You Rank Better – Myth or Not?
All right, myth or not, Google Analytics helps you rank better. I’ve never heard of that myth.
Patrick Stox (23:23)
Yeah, there’s been a bunch of stuff like that over the years. Like, if you use Chrome, you’ll rank better. If you use Google Analytics, you’ll rank better. And the answer’s always been no. I think if people thought about it logically, like if they did something like that, that would be a huge antitrust issue, which they already have enough issues with that right now.
Yeah, I think some people like say that because they’re like, well, Google gets your data that way. And I’m like, well, they get all your click data when you’re on search. They have a bunch of the data from Chrome too. So I don’t know that like Google analytics data really helps them. Plus everyone’s like, big companies always like rank better and no practically no big companies use Google analytics. Like they’re always on Adobe or something else. Like that. I’m not.
I shouldn’t say practically, no, but it’s more rare for big companies to use Google Analytics.
Linking Out To Other Sites Is Bad – Myth or Not?
Christopher Lara (24:22)
Alright, for our next myth, I’ve actually worked with some people who feel really strongly about this. I disagree. Linking out to sites sends visitors away and gives away your link juice. Myth or not?
Patrick Stox (24:36)
So for the individual page, it’s not going to have any difference. Like you’ve already got like the page rank, the juice for that page. And then basically the value that’s there is being split up for the pages you link to. so.
That page won’t be affected, but if you’re linking to a bunch of other pages on your site, technically, you could be taking a very small amount away from them. So it’s not completely wrong, but it’s so minor that it’s not something I would worry about. In the grand scheme of things, you have better things to do. But yeah, page rank sculpting was a thing for a while because of this.
Now, would I say stop linking to third parties? No. I think there are some potential benefits from doing that, like potentially good signals for Google to say, well, you’re citing the main Google documentation in an SEO blog. Well, that’s probably a good thing and something that might help you in some way. But I think that’s also debatable whether links out can actually help you.
It’s kind of one of those things where it’s a gray area or an unknown. Because I think like Matt Cutts back in the day actually said, yes, like we have things where that can help you. And John Mueller’s like, no, like that’s not going to help you. I’m just a big fan. Like, I think that’s so minuscule that I’m like, just link where it makes sense. Don’t worry about it.
Christopher Lara (26:11)
Yeah, I’m a big fan of put the links in if it helps your content, if it makes it a better experience for the readers. I know for some of the sites I read, I’ll follow that link to dig deeper into something and go maybe back to the article and just kind of builds trust with me and that site. I think if you’re creating content, just do what’s best for your readers.
Patrick Stox (26:35)
Yep, agree.
Social Signals Affect SEO – Myth or Not?
Keri Rosemond (26:37)
myth or not, social signals affect SEO.
Patrick Stox (26:40)
Yeah, myth. but fun fact based, based in reality, maybe 2012 or so could have been earlier than that. They, they actually like put social signals within the algorithm, like made a big announcement and everything. I think it was around the time they had partnered with Twitter and then like, they, they basically had their fire hose access to Twitter data shut off and.
then they just took that away. They’re like, no, we can’t really trust this because it could go away at any time. So currently, I would say no, if they don’t directly at least impact SEO. But yeah, I mean, you get more likes, more shares, more visibility. Maybe you get some extra links and that kind of stuff. So yeah, potentially. I think that’s a thing that they’ve confirmed is the things shared on Twitter maybe.
Christopher Lara (27:24)
You might be crawled more often.
Patrick Stox (27:34)
crawling faster, but that’s not necessarily gonna help you rank better or anything. But getting extra links from extra visibility, yeah, that can potentially help. But then directly use the ranking, nah.
Keri Rosemond (27:47)
Okay, thanks.
Domain Authority Is A Ranking Factor – Myth or Not?
So SEO myth or not, domain authority is a ranking factor.
Patrick Stox (27:53)
Another controversial one right now. So in the leak, there was a mention of site authority. Now for years, Google has denied, every Googler has denied that they had anything like domain authority or anything like that. But now with this, we see the site authority. But again, if you look at the description of it, it says something like it’s used for…
quality. So we don’t know what is actually in that site authority. We don’t know necessarily how they’re using it or what they’re using it for except something related to authority. So is it used in ranking? We don’t know. Could be used in testing, could be used in any number of things. Like these weren’t necessarily ranking factors that leaked. Like it was literally document storage. So maybe they want to try and align a signal to something like that.
I mean, it is possible that they use it, but they say they don’t. I think is the takeaway there. But there is something called site authority that they are using. So.
Keri Rosemond (29:04)
Thank you. So the domain authority that we see in the Ahrefs tool is a really good guide for improving your website, but it’s not directly related to Google Site Authority. Like, that the everyday per –
Patrick Stox (29:21)
Yeah, we don’t know. We don’t know what Google site authority really is. Like it’s not other than the reason it’s something for quality. But again, that could be like a quality check that they’re running. I don’t think like the, you know, we have, we have DR domain rank. Moz has domain authority. I don’t think like those metrics necessarily matters so much to Google. Like they’re going to be looking at page rank, like the individual page.
Keri Rosemond (29:24)
Right, right.
Patrick Stox (29:48)
the only time I could think where they really use the potentially like a domain or folder level signals is with like brand new content. Like it doesn’t have any signals yet. So it kind of gets to inherit some temporary signals till it can build up its own. that might be where they use something like that, but it wouldn’t probably wouldn’t factor into, the rankings for an individual page, like in the long run, I would say.
But yeah, it’s, I’m gonna explain a little something else. Like my personal take on those metrics is it’s like an extrapolation of page rank to a domain level. You got a bunch of strong pages, they all kind of link together. Like it kind of provides a guide for how strong an overall domain is based on the page rank and the links going to individual pages. But I actually prefer like if I’m looking at,
you know, ranking and stuff like I’m going to be looking at UR, which is like very somewhat similar to PageRank. It’s the page level metric and that I think is the better metric. These domain buyers that are always like use DR and DA. I’m like, why? Why are you doing that? I don’t really understand that. Like, and potentially just because if the page isn’t launched, you don’t really know like what it…
Christopher Lara (30:46)
the page.
Patrick Stox (31:11)
could be, like how strong that page could be. But probably something like an average UR score across the pages would be a better metric to use in that situation if you’re buying links and stuff, simply because then you would know on average, this is how strong a page gets. Not like, this is how strong the domain is overall. I don’t think that’s really a great metric for that.
Keri Rosemond (31:37)
And that wraps up today’s episode. A huge thank you to Patrick Stox and Christopher for joining us today and sharing your valuable insights. Patrick, what’s a good way for everyone listening to contact you?
Patrick Stox (31:50)
You can find me on Twitter, LinkedIn, I’m Patrick Stox, STOX, and thanks for having me on.
Keri Rosemond (31:57)
Awesome.
Be sure to follow us for more educational episodes here at TheeDigital’s Growth Cast. If you have any questions or want to learn more about how we can help your business thrive online, visit our website at TheeDigital.com. Thanks for watching.
Tags: Google • Our Favorites • Podcast • Search Engine Optimization
