Here’s what we learned.
Over the past 3 years I’ve spent a great deal of time in two SEO tools: Ahrefs and Majestic.
Both of these tools are used among our team for analyzing and vetting websites as part of our prospecting process.
We rely heavily on Ahrefs’ Domain Rating and Majestic’s Trust/Citation Flow in determining the quality of websites.
In August of 2019, we pulled the Majestic Millions and Top Domains On The Web by Ahrefs Rank to analyze similarities between how they’re rating sites.
For this analysis, I filtered all domains to only include .com, .net, and .org domain extensions.
This resulted in 269,295 sites in common between the two indices.
This was pretty surprising to see that these two tools only shared roughly a quarter of domains in common.
To get a better understanding of these sites individually we ran the entire mutual site list through URLProfiler to pull metrics from both tools.
Initial key findings
Of the entire 269,295 sites averages looked like this:
It’s interesting to see the Majestic TrustFlow and CitationFlow for these top sites is fairly low for a scale out of 100.
Domain Rating from Ahrefs is somewhat more what we expected. Here are the average link metrics across the Top 50 Topics, sorted by domain count.
Topical Trust Flow Analysis
We also pulled the Majestic Top Topical Trust Flow for each site so we could take a look at how the sites compared by niche.
Here’s how things looked by each metrics average:
TTF with Highest Average DR
🛍️Shopping / Merchandise
Average Domain Rating: 66
TTF with Highest Average Number of Links
💼Shopping / Office Products
Average Number of Links: 19,229
TTF with Highest Trust Flow Average
🛍️Shopping / Merchandise
Average Domain Rating: 38
TTF with Highest Citation Flow Average
️🏀Sports / Resources
Average Citation Flow: 40
🛒Shopping / General Merchandise
Average Citation Flow: 40
📷Adult / Image Galleries
Average Citation Flow: 40
✈️Recreation / Travel is the most occurring site topic between the two lists. It outranks the next topic below it by almost 3,000 sites.
Domain Rating Buckets and Trust Ratio Analysis
This is one thing that we expected and am glad to see to be true. As DR increases so does the Trust Ratio.
If you’re unfamiliar with the Trust Ratio, its a simple equation that compares the Trust Flow to the Citation Flow.
If you don’t have access to both of these tools, you can use this as a gauge to where your prospect might fall for the tool you’re missing.
Typically, we look for a Trust Ratio higher than 0.7.
Domain Rating and Trust Flow Buckets
There are two big things we wanted to look at with this research.
We wanted to see where the majority of sites fit in two buckets, Trust Flow and Domain Ratings.
We also wanted to see how site types ranked and changed across these buckets as well.
One interesting thing we noticed was that Majestic has more sites in their top million on the lower end of the TF score and Ahrefs has more sites towards the middle of their DR score.
Trust Flow Buckets
Domain Rating Buckets
High Level Takeaways
Computers and News seem to rule the internet in terms of the niches with the highest average Domain Rating. In addition, 8 of the top 10 niches with the highest average DR have hit what feels like a glass ceiling of DR64.
The average number of linking root domains to be a player in any of the largest categories requires around ~15,000 domains. Better get to building those links.
