How to Measure a Website’s quality? 4 Different Measurement Methods

As an online marketer, one of the biggest challenges is to find the best possible websites to partner with in formats such as affiliation or media buying. You need to know that your time and money are not wasted on low-quality, low potential websites. With so many websites out there, how are we to know if any given site is worth our time?
There are different tools and website measurements methods out there that can help you understand a site’s worth. Each relies on different metrics and algorithms. In this article, we’ll explain what stands behind each of the most significant website measurement tools and help you determine which of these fits your specific needs of qualifying websites.
The tools we’ll cover are: ‘Google PageRank’, ‘Moz Rank’, ‘MajesticSEO flows’ and our very own ‘Similarweb Website Ranking‘. Each of these tools uses a different ranking points system, following its own logic and for its own purposes.

Google PageRank is for authority

Google PageRank (PR) is primarily based on the number of links a website receives, on the assumption that higher-quality sites are more likely to be linked to. Other factors that go into PageRank are the PR scores of the sites which link to it, the size of a page, the number of changes, the time since the page was updated, the text in headlines, and the text in hyperlinked anchor texts.
One main disadvantage of the PageRank is that it is updated infrequently, so it is often out of date. Another important factor is page rank can be easily manipulated, making it less reliable for website qualification.

SEO firm Elliance’s illustration of PR scores

Moz Page Authority is for search rankings

Here’s how Moz describes its own proprietary ranking method:
Page Authority is Moz’s calculated metric for how well a given webpage is likely to rank in Google.com’s search results. It is based on the Mozscape web index and includes link counts, mozRank, mozTrust, and dozens more.
Moz ranks both pages and domains, updates regularly, and provides a ranking of 1-100. Moz’s premium tools provide a lot of insights, but you can get a sense of how this all works using their Open Site Explorer tool, which will display Moz scores and lists of inbound links leading to any web page.
The Moz ranking method is a complex system that seeks to mimic Google’s algorithm. It’s not totally accurate, since the team at Moz doesn’t have access to Google’s secrets, but Moz scores do come pretty close. It’s best for finding out where a website is likely to appear in search engine results.
Usually, the Moz rank is good for understanding the SEO potential of a site, helping you understand, for instance, if a link from this site will be useful.

MajesticSEO is for predicting rank

MajesticSEO is a tool that ranks sites based on their link profile – the number and quality of incoming links. They have 2 types of ranks – trust flow and citation flow. Trust flow tells you how valuable their linking websites are and citation flow tells you how these incoming links are distributed. Usually, a good link profile is one that has a close to 1 ratio between the trust and citation flows. Also – the higher their trust and citation flows are, (respectively), the better.
This tool is great for predicting a website’s rank and understanding its value as a potential link source. Our chief editor – Natalie Halimi, wrote about a year ago, a post that includes a case study that compares MajestciSEO’s metrics with Google’s page rank, on SearchEngineJournal.

Similarweb Top Sites – for traffic and audience engagement

Neither PageRank nor Moz score is based on traffic, and MajesticSEO focuses on link stats. None of the aforementioned tools take into account “stickiness,” or traffic engagement, though. A website can have a lot of visitors which are generated via paid sources, but a real bar engagement due to irrelevant or low-quality traffic.
If you want to understand the quality level of a site, stickiness needs to come into play. This is why in Similarweb’s website ranking, we’ve taken into account both traffic and engagement. Our unique ranking algorithm combines unique visits to a site, together with the average page views. With this algorithm, you can a pretty good picture of a website’s worth. We provide rankings on a global, country, and category level, making it easier for you to determine not only the quality of a site but also its relevancy to your needs. Similarweb is also able to provide website ranking for sub-domains, so you can determine, for instance, if a website such as ru.domain.com, ranks high in Russia.

Similarweb PRO ranks the top ten weather websites

Marketers care about engagement

Traffic and engagement are extremely important factors for marketing purposes since they go beyond the narrow SEO perspective of link building and look at the way a website resonates with its audience as a whole. Will an ad on this website lead to conversions? That depends on how many people are coming to the site, how relevant they find the message and if they visit other pages on that site. If you choose to advertise on a specific category of a website, you want to know what is the probability that someone will actually reach this category. If you’re publishing a sponsored post on a website, you want to know if there’s a real chance that this post will bring in new visitors to your site.

Here’s an example comparing pages per visit for imdb.com with rottentomatoes.com, the top two movie websites in the US, using Similarweb

When you want maximum information about a website, try combining multiple ranking systems to get a full picture. For instance, check a website’s Moz rank to see how it’s doing in Google searches, and then look at Similarweb to see whether the site has engaged traffic.