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Measuring the authority of web pages

May 31, 2017 by · Leave a Comment 

What we know for sure is that there is no single authority metric that Google uses when ranking pages.  From comments and other disclosures by Google staff, we know that there are several currently undisclosed metrics that form the level of authority of a page. Here is what we know:

Google says that the authority of content is calculated on a page-by-page basis. This means that there is no single domain level authority figure that applies to all content under that domain. This would lead to some bad assumptions of individual content, so Google was forced to look at it by the page. For example, it would be difficult to apply it on a per-user basis for sites like YouTube and Tumblr, so every single page has its authority.

There are still site-wide signals that have an effect on the authority of the page. It’s not a blanket application across all pages. One of the initial attempts to fight spam, The Penguin update, applied penalties across the entire site. Now, with Penguin a part of the core algorithm, it applies at the page level. In reality, it is a good thing that penalties and boosts apply at the page level. It is possible that the computational load was too great to do so in the past.

The days when PageRank was all you needed to rank are gone. Now there are something like 200+ ranking signals, of which as many 20 could directly affect authority. Google wants to ensure that if you rank high in its results, that what you are saying is true, and that it belongs there.Save

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