Trusted Sites – 5 Ways To Determine Quality Sites Without Pagerank

It seems that the Google Pagerank is going to rest for a while now, or perhaps be buried along with the decade that has passed. Google’s exclusive rights to Stanford University’s Pagerank was set to expire this year, and obviously, they have been busy enough in improving more important aspects of search (Instant, Places, Local search, spam filters and more of their services).

We all know that Pagerank is still pretty much alive, but this post will focus on giving other methods you can use to determine a site’s quality.

Source:

Google Pagerank Dead or Alive at Techjaws

Google 10-K 2009 at Wikinvest

So as an SEO, how do we determine authority, trusted and quality sites without the help of Pagerank? Well, the good news is that there are so many alternatives that we can all use to verify if a site is worth our time in sending requests,  engaging with or utilizing in order to acquire quality links. Here are some of them:

Linkscape’s Mozrank

This is the most reliable substitute to Google’s Pagerank as of the moment. Linkscape has immensely improved its process in gathering link data, which was really in time to compensate the absence of PR. You can install SearchStatus or mozBar SEO plugin to see the Mozrank of the sites you’re targeting.

Alexa Traffic Rank

Sites that have Alexa ranking of 300,000 and/or less are considerably worth your time; given that these sites are getting traffic and are mostly active.

Page and Domain Authority through Open Site Explorer

Checking a page and its domain’s authority manually through Open Site Explorer is also a good way to make sure if your prospected site will be significant to your link development campaign.

SEMRush SE Traffic Price

Of course, if the price of the site’s traffic is high then it simply translates to how valuable their incoming traffic is as well as the significance of the keywords where they are ranking well. You can easily check a site’s traffic price if you have SEOQuake plugin for firefox installed on your browser.

Amount of Links and Link profile

The amount of links and the ratio of a site’s existing external links also play a big part in determining if a site is of high quality and if it is trusted by users and search engines. You can easily study a site’s link profile through Open Site Explorer (seeing the site’s full link metrics) and Yahoo Site Explorer. With SEOQuake, you can also have an immediate look of their link landscape’s status (particularly with the amount of links indexed by Yahoo, and the ratio of external links directing to the page and the entire site).

Well, the next question is, will the dofollow chase Pagerank to its grave? Anyway, the best thing that we can do for now is to just focus on quality, may it be with our content, link building efforts, relationships and other marketing aspects to be truly deserving of the rankings that we are all aiming at.

Photo Credits: Raven Tools

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1. Free Links – 18 Ways To Get High Quality Backlinks Instantly
2. How to Get High Quality Backlinks – Building the Fortress
3. .Edu and .Gov Sites Advanced Link Building

Tagged as: Link Building, SEO Strategies