A Niche Formula (The Von Score)

A Need

In doing key phrase research, I kinda wanted to boil what I was looking at into one number. If I could see just one number that takes into account all of the various factors that Long Tail Pro was showing me, such as Page Rank, Page Authority, the number of links, and juice links, as well as the domain age and authority and the MozRank, I thought it could help me understand what keywords would rank. And, since all of the sites would be run through the same formula, at the very least their relationship to one another would be helpful. For example, a 27 may not mean anything, but when the other choice is a 42, the 27 is clearly better. I thought this might also help prevent subjectivity from skewing the results.

The Rationale

Clearly, the most important number for ranking is the Google Page Rank. Well... I dont actually know that... but the PR does tell us something about what Google thinks about a page... ot at least what they think about its backlinks. Then there is MozRank. MozRank is a function of the number of quality links to a site, and since that figures heavily in Google's rank math, I think I should also include it in my formula. This also means that I dont need to include LTP's "Juice Link" in my formula, since that data is already accounted for in the MozRank. In addition, it seems to me that Page Authority is the next most important piece of data, followed by Domain Authority. I think Domain Age is already plugged in to Domain Authority, so I feel safe leaving that.

I decided to take them, in that order of importance, and bake them into one number between 1 and 100, weighing the factors I felt were important. I decided to call the results the "Von Score".

The Formula

For this formula, let Page Rank = PR; MozRank = Mz; Page Authority = PA; Domain Authority = DA; and, as stated above, we will call the result, Von.

The formula (in the ugliest possible notation) looks like: (((PR*4)*10)+((Mz*3)*10)+(PA*2)+DA)/10=Von

Or, in English, PageRank times 4 and that times 10, plus MozRank times 3 and that times 10, plus Page Authority times 2, plus Domain Authority equals Von.

Page Rank is multiplied by 4 in order to give it the most weight. Both PR and Moz are multiplied by ten to shift the decimal. Moz is multiplied by 3 to give it slightly less weight than PR. Page Authority is multiplied by 2, giving it less weight. Because PA is already a number between 1 and 100, there is no need to shift the decimal. Lastly, Domain Authority is added, essentially being multiplied by one. These numbers are added together and divided by 10. Why 10? Because 4+3+2+1=10, and those are the weights given the factors in the function. They could have been given any weight... it just so happens that if they are assigned weights of 1-4, the sum will be 10, which means that you can do the final step in your head of moving the decimal one place to the left.

The result is a number between 1 and 100 which takes into account the PageRank, MozRank, Page Authority and Domain Authority for each page, allowing a quick comparison of pages. What is not included are things like keyword targeting in the page title or exact match domain... items which Google is apparently deprecating anyway.

So there ya go... that is how I determine the Von Score for each site that I see in my key phrase research with LTP. , and for each group of sites per keyword. Feel free to use this formula... maybe it is useful.

In the future I may refine this formula, but for now I will try it like this.

Enjoy!

PS: Further notes: In terms of PR, a PageRank of NA, or "no PR' is valued as a -1

What do you think? Useful? Worthless? Somewhere in between (Uthless? Worthful?) Let me know and leave a comment below.