May 24

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What is URL Rating

By Jason Khoo

May 24, 2020


Transcript

Hi guys, and welcome to another edition of Zupo's SEO Talk & Tea.

Today's conversation is what is URL rating? URL ratings are specific to Ahref, which is a certain SEO software. And so today what we want to discuss is what is URL rating and what it means compared to something like domain authority or domain rating.

But before we jump on in, I want to introduce the tea we're having today. We're having a Japanese green tea called the Sencha, I think it's Fukamushi Saeakari Sencha. I've actually had this before. This was gifted to me on my birthday with a whole series of other teas to be tested. And as you can see on the box, if you can see it from there, usually this is a taste testing kit. So there's a Chinese green tea versus a Japanese green tea. And this is from the company Mei Leaf. Mei Leaf is a big influencer in my life in terms of watching their YouTube videos and learning how to understand tea a little bit better. So if you ever wanted to get more interested in tea, more than like the 30 seconds I spend on these videos, go ahead and go over to Mei Leaf and watch Don go ham on different tea things.

But let's go ahead and get brewing and let's get talking. So what is URL rating? URL rating, like I just said, is a very Ahref-specific metric. Ahrefs is an SEO software that we use really heavily. It's comparable to Moz and SEMrush. You could consider them probably all competitors of each other, although arguably each one does something better than the other, but also they each do one thing weaker than the other. It doesn't really matter. I'm not here to peddle which one's the best. All I really care about is talking about what is URL rating. I extensively use Ahref, so I'm concerned about that one. I'm not 100% sure if Moz and SEMrush have their own version of it. I know Moz has domain authority and Ahrefs has domain rating, but I'm not sure if Moz has the URL rating or URL authority version of it.

But anyway, let's just jump over to what URL rating even is, and why it's important. So in another video I've talked about what is domain authority and domain rating, and here's a quick ten second recap. It is the overall strength of your website score from zero to 100. The closer to 100 you are, the more likely you are to rank, and the more likely that Google sees your site as powerful, based on your link profile amongst other ranked factors. So that's what domain authority, domain rating is.

What's URL rating? If you're ever using a tool like Ahrefs or something similar, you'll see up in the score for domain rating, and then URL rating. URL rating is a little bit different, where the domain talks about the whole website as a whole, so every page that has index combined together, what is the rating. URL rating is a little bit different. It's specific to that one unique page. And why that is important is that it will then assign a score to every URL of that site and give it a score. So sometimes URL rating is higher than the domain authority or domain rating, sometimes it's lower.

And the reason why it has some strategic importance is because if you have a big website, usually what you're trying to do is rank different services and products. So you'll have specific products, product categories, services. You might be trying to do a lot of different things. When you're comparing and trying to rank for a site, as I mentioned before in other videos, oftentimes your product breadth or your service breadth is larger than just one. So usually your homepage can really only be optimized for one kind of service. Generally you have more.

So what often happens is, let's say we use pizza, and I want to rank for a pepperoni pizza and then sausage pizza. Well, if I have two product pages, if I'm using URL rating, this is where it becomes important. I need to look at the URL rating of my pepperoni pizza page. Then I need to go to my competitor's website, who are already ranking, and see the URL rating of their pepperoni pizza pages. Because what we're doing is, since we're trying to rank for a specific keyword like pepperoni pizza, we need look at the micro, at what is the micro niche version of that on your own site? It's probably the pepperoni pizza page. And then what are the other competitors? It's probably their pepperoni pizza page. And then therefore it's not the best, like a domain authority or domain rating, it's best to look at the URL rating of those individual pages, so you can generally see which one is the strongest and maybe why it's ranking better.

I will say URL rating, I don't use it as extensively as I use domain rating, but URL rating is usually the method I use to see a top level overview of who of my competitors has a higher-scoring URL specific to a product or service that I'm looking at, and then I kind of dig deeper from there. So I don't really focus on it. I used to use it as more of a compass in the beginning, and then if I see our competitors have a higher score than us, then I need to do some digging deeper, going down the rabbit hole of figuring out why. What are the referring domains? What are the links coming in? And how can we kind of cover that ground?

So URL rating is a little bit more niche, or I don't want to say niche, but it's specific. You can go to individual pages and get a better understanding of which page and which service, and what's the URL rating score compared to your competitors, and therefore you can have a much more micro comparison. But like I said, I would use it in tandem with other metrics, like referring domains, number of content pieces, and so on and so forth. But again, that's what URL rating is. When you're using it in your day to day, I would use it more as a general research, top level overview kind of metric.

But hopefully that was valuable, and that would help you kind of use a new tool set in your... I mean, it's a new tool in your tool belt when you are researching and scoping SEO work. But if you guys found that valuable, please like and subscribe. And I'm going to pour out this green tea. It's actually a very seaweed tasting. I don't think I mentioned that earlier. And so I haven't loved this one the first couple of times of drinking it, but we're going to give it another shot. I hope to see you guys again soon. Thanks.

Yep. Super seaweedy.

Jason Khoo

About the author

Jason is founder and CEO of Zupo, which is an Orange County based SEO consulting agency helping construct powerful long term SEO strategies for our clients. Jason also enjoys multiple cups of tea a day, hiding away on weekends catching up on reading and rewatching The Simpsons for the 20th time.

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