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Correlation Studies done with DomainScore and Competing SEO Metrics

Domainscore competes with and even outperforms some of the best SEO metrics from the biggest SEO big data companies.

Jim Westergren

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2019-04-02

DomainScore is our own proprietary metric that shows the quality and strength of a domains backlink profile using our own backlink data. It primarily competes with Ahrefs Domain Rating (DR) and Moz Domain Authority (DA).

My study is transparent and public, see it all here in this Google Sheet. The charts below are NOT IMAGES. They are embedded directly from the Google Sheet and, of course, the correlation number is calculated using the CORREL formula.

Correlation to rank position

I took all 4466 keywords in 9 languages that I track in Rank, checked all domains that rank in the top 10, collected the third party metrics (I pay for their APIs) and printed the data which I pasted into the Google Sheet. This gave me sample size of 42084 search positions. The test was done on 2019-03-29 and gave the following results:

However, in my opinion, measuring a domain level SEO metric how it correlate to rank of some random keywords is not a good study. Strong domains that happens to mention some keywords that they don't focus on and rank 8-10 will skew the results for example. A correlation of 0.1 is almost no correlation at all.

Is there a way to do a better correlation study? Absolutely yes.

Correlation to Ahrefs Total Organic Traffic

SEO metrics on domain level should be compared to how the domain ranks in google as a whole and not just a few random keywords. There exist such a great metric, and it is the Organic Traffic number from Ahrefs that is based on 478 million keywords in 155 countries. This number estimates the total organic traffic to the whole domain. Of course the number is not perfect but it can be expected that a high number means that the domain generally ranks well in Google.

It is not yet possible to get this number from Ahrefs using their API but you can get the numbers by exporting CSV files of referring domains and linked domains. My account level allowed me to export 25 million rows which gave me plenty of data to do a good correlation study with a big sample.

A few details about the method:

On a big sample of 3,4 million domains tested on 2019-03-28 DomainScore has a 19.88% better correlation coefficient to Total Organic Traffic compared to Ahrefs Domain Rating (0.4904 vs 0.4090).

"DomainScore has a 19.88% better correlation coefficient to Total Organic Traffic compared to Ahrefs Domain Rating"

I repeated the same study five days later and included only for those domains that I had collected the new Moz DA (smaller sample of 335 271 domains) giving the following results:

Here the Moz Domain Authority outperforms the other 2 by far which is great.

Google Sheet has a cell limit of 5 million cells so obviously the data of the big sample is not included there.

Get DomainScore for free

I have decided that any call to get DomainScore in bulk from any registered account (paid or free) will cost 0 API credits for the remainder of 2019 (and perhaps later as well). If you want a really large volume for a one time study feel welcome to contact us.