Why Domain Rating is More Important Than PageRank - Google Search Console Guide Neil Patel

- You've heard of Google PageRank and you've heard of Domain Authority. If you want to grow your search engine rankings, which one should you be focusing on? Hey everyone, I'm Neil Patel and today I'm gonna teach you why Domain Authority is more important than Google PageRank. (upbeat electronic classical music) Google PageRank is a number from zero to ten and the algorithm for Google PageRank was created by one of their founders, Larry Page. The problem with Google PageRank is, it doesn't get updated frequently. Years and years ago, it was used a lot by Google, in which, websites that had a zero weren't that authoritative and websites with a 10 were super authoritative. For example, Google is a 10. Your website may be a four, or a five, or a six. The problem with PageRank is, again as I mentioned, it doesn't really get updated frequently. So as a SEO when you're doing changes to your website, and you're trying to grow your rankings, are you really going to wait six months to a year for Google to update that PageRank number, to figure out if you're doing better or worse. Probably not, it's not a good indicator, because of how long it takes them to update, of if you're doing better or worse. The real key metric is, are your rankings and traffic going higher? But again, it takes along time for your rankings and traffic to go higher. If you look at neilpatel.com, I rank on page one for the term, on-line marketing. I also rank on page one for the term, SEO. It's not like I did something special to rank really high out of the blue, instead what happened, it took six months, a year, and even a year and a half to rank for some of these key terms. But the leading indicator, that showed me that I was doing well, is that my Domain Authority continually started to increase. Now there's two main sites that you can go to, to figure out your Domain Authority, Open Site Explorer and Aherfs. Open Site Explorer is free. Aherfs costs money. Open Site Explorer is also limited, so after a few usages, they're gonna limit you and they're gonna be like hey, you need to pay to use more of it. Nonetheless, they both update their number frequently. I personally prefer ahrefs.com because they update it more frequently than Moz. Moz owns Open Site Explorer, so it's up to you on what you wanna use, but try to focus on your Domain Authority. It goes from a scale from 0-100. The higher up you go, the better off you are. And when you're doing your link building efforts, try to go after links from sites with Domain Authorities that are larger than yours. By doing that, your rankings and traffic are going to increase at a much quicker pace. (upbeat electronic classical music)