What would you prefer DA or TF?

[Prophet]

Hey People,

With PR wipped out of metrics listing in 2016 what had been your ultimate choice in deciding a good website across these months and what would you prefer analyzing in 2017?

Looking forward to understand the current trend running in.

Cheers,
Prophet

 

[Nemanja]

Hey Prophet,

Both DA and TF are flawed (Especially TF). I have seen a lot of Low TF sites that have huge number of links from huffpost, washingtonpost, wikipedia and so on.

You should check Ahrefs for Domain Rating and Referring domains. Those two stats are the best indicators of a good domain these days. Generally if a domain has DR 45+ , DA20+ Referring domains 50+ I consider it a good candidate. If it has 5-10+ links from high authority sites (DR60-70+) you can buy it if spam checks are ok.
Let me know if you need more help with this.

 

[Zipix]

For the last few months I tend to believe Ahref's DR is the go-to metric to use for SEO purposes.

It takes 2 no-follow blog comments to boost TF from 5 to 15+. I only use it for topical relevance these days.

The amount of time it takes moz to update DA is just absurd, I hardly ever open any of their tools. Been like this for over an year, and will keep it this way.

 

[Steve Brownlie]

I'll second @Nemanja and @Zipix that if you must use metrics then AHREFS DR seems like the best balance between quality and speed of them updating their index (I rarely see anything I know is live take long to appear).

Having said that I think the two use cases that people make for metrics - buying domains and deciding what links to build - see metrics overused. I'll explain below:

Buying an old site with links to it

If you're just buying a 'site' (ie it's not currently a viable business/with lots of useful traffic) then name is probably the main thing I'd think about since I want a brand that's useful to me in the long run, not a short term boost from a few links to an awful name. We've all seen random stuff where people have made up words to go along with some initials their domain had. Eg 4TGseo.com - 4 The Greatest SEO ... etc (no idea if that's a real one, just similar to stuff I've seen).

Also my second consideration is just 'is it cheaper to buy this profile, and is the profile on niche enough that it saves money vs just building the links'. If yes then it's a small headstart but definitely not enough to make it worthwhile vs buying a perfect brand from day 1.

Take a look at @CCarter's site http://www.moneyoverethics.com/ - clearly he wanted that exact name. Sure you could rank a page or two more quickly if some DR50 site T97Ethics.org existed to buy but... well. You get the idea.

Building Links

For my clients, of course I have minimum metrics etc as that's such a common requirement and request it makes sense for us to just work it into our 'system' as a default setting. However for my own projects I just look at relevance, and realness of the site. I don't really care about metrics. I actually checked a few batches, though, and the metrics were really solid on the ones I built for my own sites anyway so it seems that, honestly, sites that 'pass the sniff test' tend to have good metrics anyway but in 'passing the sniff test' you eliminate all the sites that have good metrics but aren't exactly ideal (made for guest post type sites that you can buy links from for $5 on Fiverr etc...). So I like the idea that you can reduce your dependence on third party metrics, which let's face it, no matter how good they are they are irrelevant to Google (they have their own internal ones anyway), by developing your 'sense of smell' and whatever is the metric of choice you'll always be picking good places to build your links and promote your brand.