If you are an SEO expert, you must know that link building is an extremely crucial strategy of SEO. Backlinks are responsible to set the authority and reputation of any website as they are the strong ranking signals that push the authority and rankings up.
But the real question is, are all those links we generate equal in quality? Well, the answer is No.
Some links are highly authoritative and have great value in SEO, while other links are just dangerous for your website. That’s why most SEO professionals spend hours and days recognizing which are the good quality links and which are the bad ones.
However, the fact is, there is no single element of the figure you could check to determine the quality of links. If you want to judge the quality, you need to take multiple things to take into account such as link relevance, the reputation of the donor website, and how the link is embedded in your content.
Therefore, many SEO professionals and agencies refer to SEO parameters such as DA, DR, and CF to analyze the quality of links and other elements so they can determine the overall reputation and ranking of the website.
Here we have made a brief comparison between DA, DR, and CF to help both beginners and professionals in performing detailed analysis of the website while comparing it with other sites in terms of quality, backlinks, and ranking.
What is DA?
DA stands for Domain authority which is one of the most essential SEO metrics developed by Moz.
Now Moz has basically combined more than 40 factors. Some of them are known by professionals, while most of them are still unknown while checking the quality and reputation of the website.
Based on all those 40 factors, the tool helps determine some important credentials of the website together in a numeric form. Like you can analyze the quality or score of the website on a scale from 0- 100.
In these metrics, 0 is the lowest authority and 100 is the highest. While the websites with 20+ authorities are considered optimal for guest blogging.
“DA is a ranking factor in SEO”- A myth debunked!
Among all the metrics, most SEO professionals check the domain authority of the site so they can analyze the overall quality and reputation. It tells webmasters about the current progress of their SEO campaigns.
Most importantly, when SEO experts know that the DA of their website has increased due to a variety of good backlinks, they can easily earn money from their website by inviting people to create guest posts. The more the DA, the high chances to earn money from guest posts. Because professionals always hunt for the sites that have high DA’s.
However, there is also one myth regarding DA as most people believe that domain authority is the ranking factor of the site, which is not true.
To shed more light on this, Google explained “Domain Authority is not a metric used by Google in determining search rankings and has no effect on the SERPs.”
With that being said, it’s crystal clear that domain authority is not a ranking factor.
DA just helps and supports your SEO strategy and gives a numeric figure to determine the overall worth of your website.
What is DR?
Now let’s move forward to DR or domain rating. Just like domain authority, DR could also be scaled from 0-100 which shows the strength and reputation of your site based on from lowest to highest number.
Similarly, people assume DR is also a ranking factor- which is not true. Yes, we agree that a high DR website could also top the list of search results, but this is just because the other credentials and parameters of the website are also high in the eyes of Google.
Another fact is people check DR as it’s the key indicator of getting backlinks from some websites.
Importance of DR
As explained earlier, domain rating is not the only factor associated with the ranking of your website on search engines. If you want to check the rating of the website, figure out its DR. If the DR is high in number, it means the website has strong backlinks.
So, we cannot overlook the importance of domain rating which can be achieved by having multiple high-quality backlinks.
When an SEO team creates their link-building strategy, they tend to compare multiple websites together so they can get the best out of them with great research.
This proves DR is also an important metric that can help create a lot of meaningful connections and may improve the rankings in different ways.
Moreover, a website with a high domain rating can get the benefit of its own link juice with the internal linking solution.
What is CF?
CF is an abbreviation of citation flow which is a metric derived from the company Majestic. Just like DR and DA, CF also explains the authority of your website on a scale of 0-100.
Let it be understood this way.
Suppose you are a great book author and you have recently published your book regarding life and death. Many other authors agree with your ideas and concepts and love to refer to them in their own published work. After these references and popularity, you would be considered an expert in the field, right?
Well, that’s how citation flow works.
This is probably a new metric in the world of other SEO metrics such as TF, DA, and DR. It helps you analyze the effectiveness of your website by checking how many other websites are linking to it.
Also, citation flow is not just enough to analyze the reputation of the website. It usually works in combination and conjunction with other SEO elements to earn more trustworthiness and authority of the site.
Let’s compare the numbers
As these SEO metrics are totally different from each other, we could not compare them. But just for fun and your complete understanding, here we have mentioned DA, DR, and CF of the world’s top websites so you can get a better idea about their reputation and authority in the industry.
| Domain | DA | DR | CF |
| YouTube.com | 100 | 98 | 74 |
| Facebook.com | 96 | 100 | 100 |
| Twitter.com | 94 | 99 | 100 |
| BBC.com | 95 | 92 | 78 |
| Amazon.com | 96 | 96 | 84 |
| Netflix.com | 93 | 91 | – |
| Reddit.com | 91 | 94 | 75 |
| LinkedIn.com | 98 | 98 | 97 |
| Zoom.us | 93 | 94 | 49 |
In the above analysis, you have analyzed that DA and DR are relatively higher than CF but still, there is no tendency that all of these metrics define ranking and could be comparable in any regard.
Conclusion
When it comes to SEO, all the metrics and parameters such as DR, DA, and CF are equally important. But when you take these metrics as a ranking element in SEO, then it’s a misconception and a myth that really needs to be changed.
So, we suggest it’s better to see the other picture of the story and find out their strengths and roles instead of counting them as a ranking factor and analyzing the authority of the site depending on their scores.
If you still have any confusion, let our experts know at Hukumat Networks. We have a team of SEO specialists that can help clear all the conflicts and give through consultancy besides offering guaranteed SEO services.
