Ahrefs SEO Metrics: How To Use Some SEO Terms in Ahrefs

Are you confused with some SEO terms you see in Ahrefs, such as Ahrefs SEO Metrics, abbreviated words, and headlines? Then this article is for you!
Over the 3 years, I have started using Ahrefs and using this tool, I see many experienced SEO experts outraged by the crowds of data I’ve seen in this tool, and I agree with them.
If you are new to the concept of SEO, the feeling of loss is completely normal, and Ahrefs SEO metrics are enough to leave question marks in the minds of anyone using the Ahrefs tool.
The purpose of this educational material and guiding content is to help you.
Now the good news:
Must read » Guide For Getting Rankings And High-Quality Traffic With SEO
These SEO metrics are not as scary as you think, sometimes even quite useful.
It’s easy to understand.
The list of metrics I will discuss in this article is as follows;

• Keyword Search Volume
• Click-through Rate (CTR)
• Clicks
• Cost-per-Click (CPC)
• Keyword Difficulty (AKZ)
• Organic Keywords
• Organic Traffic
• Traffic Value
• Link Value (LD)
• Field Value (AAD)
• Ahrefs Ranking (AS)

Before I explain what each of the SEO metrics means (and how we calculate them), I’d like to take some time to talk about the hiding infrastructure that powers Ahrefs.
As a result, none of these metrics would have existed if they had not created the monstrous infrastructure.
The Great Power Behind Ahrefs SEO Metrics
We are known for producing great SEO tools that help digital marketing professionals succeed in their business.
Ahrefs defines itself as a company that adopts the motto “data is above everything”.
I really respect them when I think they sell data to Google, even with the big data they have.
Having this Big Data makes Ahrefs and Ahrefs SEO metrics very powerful and meaningful.
As for the reasons;

• Bots do web browsing 24/7.
• They develop and develop custom storage solutions to accommodate all this data.
• They produce new methods for effectively querying this data and reducing predictions to tenths of a second.

A few basic numbers representing the scale of the Ahrefs infrastructure are as follows:
(For more information, see the Ahrefs datasheet.)
Developing a web browser bot that scans the Internet and stores web pages may seem like an easy thing to do.
However, navigating at a speed of 200 million pages per hour is a completely different event.
All of these components are thousands of customer’s backlink and so on. The same applies to linking data with data and developing all graphical reports in seconds.
If you’re going to build an ahrefs bot clone, let’s say it from the beginning, it can be very difficult.
So the majority of the server application infrastructure was built by Ahrefs itself.
Yes, unlike other big projects, such a big data operation cannot be covered by companies that offer Amazon AWS or other server solutions.
Must read » Top 10 Off-Page SEO Strategies To Boost Your Site Ranking
All existing solutions will either be too costly or not adapt to the size of the database.
As of today, Ahrefs’s database is a large and exclusive database of approximately 85 TRILLION rows.
It doesn’t look like MySQL and MSSQL that we usually use.
Also, according to a recent study on “most active bots”,
Ahrefs has the second most active browser outperforming Bing, Yahoo, Yandex, Baidu, and every other bot and software, except Google, the first one being Google

Okay reader, that’s enough to praise Ahrefs.
I hope that these explanations summarize how much data you have in Ahrefs.
Now let’s look at the SEO metrics calculated based on all these data.

Keyword Search Volume in Ahrefs SEO Metrics

This metric shows how many times a month people in a given country search for your target keyword on average.
In Google Keyword Planner (the actual source of data), we call it “Avg. monthly calls: ”.

NOTE: In many SEO tools, including the Ahrefs, the term “search volume” is often simply abbreviated to “Volume”.

The first thing you should know about search volume is that it shows the number of “searches”, not the number of “people”.
For example, the two of us can search 100 for the “bitcoin price,, which results in a total of 200 search volumes generated by only two people.
Here is another important, but often overlooked definition: “average”.
For many search queries, “search demand has been variable throughout the year.
Google’s keyword planner also offers this change graphically.
Must read » The Easiest Ways To Find Keywords With Low Competition
Take, for example, the keyword “Christmas gifts” that saw a huge increase in search demand every December before they disappeared in January.
How many monthly searches would you expect to see for the keyword “Christmas gifts”?
Can you search in December or June?
The result you get from most SEO tools is the average number of searches per month from the last 12 to 24 months.
In this case, Christmas Gifts do not reflect the true search value, only misleading people.

NOTE: The number of months that make up the average varies depending on the SEO tool you’re using.

Please note that search volumes are always specific to your country.
Most keyword research tools show search volumes in America by default.
However, the UK, Australia, Canada, you may want to know how many calls made in Turkey or another country.
Or maybe you want to know the global search volume? (total of searches in all countries)
You can find this data in Ahrefs Keywords Explorer.

1. The keyword you analyzed;
2. The country in which you request the data and the search volume in that country;
3. Global search volume and distribution by top search countries.
4. Want to know more about these values?

Let’s do a short question and answer:
Q1: How accurate are the search volumes in the Google Keyword Planner, which is the source of the Ahrefs data?
A1: Unfortunately, there is no evidence that the search volumes you see in Google Keyword Planner are 100% accurate.
I’ll write an article comparing keyword search volume data from three sources Google (GCP, GSC & Forecaster) have. If you say, Who will read the article now? in short, unfortunately, I could not see any data consistent with these sources.
As I mentioned earlier, search volume is calculated on average from the last 12 months. There is no way to know how many searches a particular keyword will receive in the next 30 days or months.
Q2: Why are search volumes in Ahrefs different from Google Keyword Planner? There seems to be an error here? ”
A2: “No, it’s all about how the software is designed. It would be completely wrong to expect to receive exactly the same data from two systems whose software architecture is completely different.
Must read » Domain Authority (DA): How to increase Domain Authority (DA) of your website
Ahrefs considers only the search volumes it receives from Google Keyword Planner as the first data source. It then adds click data to the data to calculate their monthly search volumes, finely screened, frequently woven.
If you’d like to learn more about how they calculate click flow data and search volumes and how this data helps, please read this article from Ahrefs. ”
Q3: “Is monthly search volume a sign of high search traffic, which indicates that my webpage can rank at the top of Google’s search results?
A3: “Yes, exactly. Here are important tips to be aware of. In this article, you can learn about those tricks. ”

Click-through Rate (CTR) in Ahrefs SEO Metrics

The Click-through Rate (CTR) in the Ahref is slightly different from that in the Google Search Console, showing how often the same user searches for a particular keyword over a 30-day period.
TO1 means that people don’t usually search for this keyword again within 30 days.
However, TO2 and TO3 do not mean that people search for a particular keyword two or three times in a row.
This only shows that the second keyword tends to repeat more in searches than the first.
Let me explain a few examples:
The “world cup” and “bitcoin price” keywords have 2.8 and 2.7 Repeat Rate (CTR), respectively, in the US.
However, in both searches, 3.7 lags behind the keyword “Facebook, which has a high Repeat Rate (CTR).
This is because many people search for “Facebook Google on Google instead of typing the URL directly in the search bar, and they do more than the word “world cup” and “bitcoin price”, if the world cup is all right, it’s searched once a year something is going on, for bitcoin I can not say the same thing, let’s see in the future.
It is also worth mentioning that the Repetition Rate (CTR) is a unique criterion that you will see only in Ahrefs.
There is another important detail in the Ahrefs Metrics.
Must read » 3 Steps to Find High Value Google Keywords

Clicks in Ahrefs SEO Metrics

I’m sure you’ve noticed Google’s latest enhancements to “quick answers” ​​and a variety of other SERP (Search Engine Results Page) features.
They are designed to avoid the need for users to randomly click on one of the search results, and it works.
We can’t deny that.
As a result, the gap between the number of searches performed and the number of clicks in search results increases.
Here’s my favorite example:

 
You can see people in the US looking for the keyword “Donald trump’s age 112 112,000 times a month.
However, only 17,000 clicks occurred in the search results.
If you open Google and look for the word “Donald trump’s age”, you’ll see why the majority of searches didn’t result in any clicks on the search results.

You don’t need to click because Google gives you the best result on top of all pages.
It is also a good example of this quick answer feature.

 
On the contrary, when you search for “the best CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software”, you are likely to click on a few search results to get ideas from different websites.
This results in more clicks than the actual number of searches, as opposed to the other case.
Because this is an industrial search and Google leaves the answer here.
Must read » How to Create High Quality Backlinks Free
For convenience, we also show CPC (Click-to-Search).
This value represents the average number of clicks people have made after searching for a particular keyword.
Have you noticed the percentages of organic and paid ads below the number of clicks?

Two years ago, Google began showing four ads above organic search results.
These paid results can show a large number of clicks that can often go to organic search results.
Since they process large amounts of click flow data in Ahrefs, they can calculate the approximate distribution of clicks between organic and paid advertising results, which is a great advantage for SEO professionals.
So, when you enter the Ahrefs word planner, you can see that for the keyword best CRM software, only 13% of clicks lead to paid results.
Most likely, it’s because people prefer to receive such information from organically ranked sites, rather than paying for the highlights, the power of SEO
Now let’s look at a branded search query like “headset”
This time, 36% of all clicks go to paid ads.
This is very probable because they advertise on behalf of the brand and consumers don’t care about clicking on the ad of a brand they are looking for, hoping to click on the link that takes them to their destination as soon as possible.

Cost-per-Click (CPC) in Ahrefs SEO Metric

CPC shows the average cost of a click on a paid search result for the keyword.

Cost-per-click (CPC) is a dynamic and highly variable number because advertisers increase or decrease their spending.
Keeping pace with this variability can sometimes be difficult.
Therefore, if you’re looking for the latest and accurate CPC values ​​for your list of target keywords, we always recommend using Google Ads instead of Ahrefs.
At the same time, our data Ahrefs also receives data from Google Ads.
Talking about the CPC values ​​you see in Ahrefs, these values ​​are just averages.
Must read » Top Free Keyword Research Tools
View them for informational purposes only, so please don’t pay too much attention to your calculations.
We provide services related to Google Ads in our agency, if you intend to log in to Google Ads, you can review our service page.

Keyword Difficulty (AKZ) in Ahrefs SEO Metric

According to my observations, Keyword Difficulty is a criterion that causes a lot of confusion in our industry.
So let us explain in detail.
Ahrefs calculates the Keyword Difficulty (AKZ) score on a logarithmic scale of 0 to 100, taking a weighted average of the number of link areas to the top 10 ranking pages available.
He never takes any other variable into account.
Therefore, the resulting number provides a reasonable estimate of how many reference domain names are required to get a place in the top 10 for your chosen keyword, but these figures are weighted average, so when you say you need to get 5 recommended backlinks link is the backlink from an authoritative site.
Facebook posts or other social links will not affect this at all.
You’ll see this just below the AKZ score in the Keyword Explorer.
Please note how it is written in the top 10 and not in the top 3, or even until it is not even in the first place.
According to our observations, backlinks are the only thing that puts you in the top 10 exactly.
Thereafter, many other sorting factors (such as user behavior or waiting time) are likely to come into play.
You should take into account that the AKZ scale is not linear, so consider it a logarithmic increase.
In this context, when Keyword Difficulty is 50 “it indicates that it is moderate“.

Nowadays, we see many people arguing about the truth of Ahrefs AKZ.
The real issue is that; Keyword Difficulty (AKZ) considers only one variable: backlinks.
We know that the number of backlinks (ref. Domain Names) is directly proportional to the rank of a page.
Even Google has previously confirmed that backlinks are one of the top 3 ranking factors.
However, backlinks alone are far from being a ranking factor.
Google takes care of hundreds of things when choosing which pages to rank:
How strong is your website? – Rooted sites are often easily ranked even for the most difficult keywords;
How good is your web page? – Likewise, a page that is not very pleasing to the eye is likely to pass a nice and detailed page in the ranking.
Must read » Boost SEO With 50 High DA Top Social Bookmarking Sites
Keyword Difficulty (AKZ) cannot answer any of these questions.
Their estimates are based on only one variable – backlinks.
So what’s the purpose of AKZ?
Let’s simplify with an example:
Tall basketball players are more likely to be better players than short players.
Let’s say you’re a 1.76-foot basketball player, which means you can’t beat someone who’s 1.90.
Of course, this is not the case.
Although height is a major contributing factor to success, it is not the ONLY contributing factor.
So, maybe you have another advantageous physical feature that increases your ability to win despite your short stature.
Where am I trying to reach this example?
Keyword Difficulty (AKZ) describes in detail the average length (Backlink profile strength) of other players in the game (I’m talking about the top pages).
The higher the average size, the more likely it is that you will need backlinks to get a chance in the rankings.
However, if you have the SEO equivalent of bionic legs (for example, great content that perfectly matches the search), you can ‘win even though you have a shorter stature (weak Backlink profile) than the rest of the players.
Conclusion: Keyword Challenge is useful for predicting how difficult it can be to rank, but AKZ is not everything, because it is based on the single ranking factor, ‘backlinks’.
Treat this with suspicion and ALWAYS search the SERP (Search Engine Result Page) before continuing with a keyword.
In general, I will write a very detailed article on the concept of keyword difficulty in which I write how this metric of Ahrefs can help you.
Now, here are some of the most popular questions about Keyword Challenge:
Q1: How accurate is the AKZ of Ahrefs? Is the accuracy or higher than the keyword difficulty scores in other tools?
A1: By definition, it would be pointless to define our AKZ score as true or false.
This metric does not estimate your chances of ranking for a particular keyword.
This is because this system does not know anything about the quality of your website or your SEO capabilities.
Therefore, it only shows the average strength of the Backlink profiles of the top 10 ranked pages.
Also, it is pointless to compare Ahrefs’ AKZ score with similar metrics in other tools because they probably calculate their scores in different ways, and with different methods.
Q2: Do you take into account the factors on the page when calculating AKZ?
A2: No. Ahrefs Keyword Challenge (AKZ) is based solely on the number of domains that link to the top-ranked pages for your target keyword.
Even if you feed some data about the site you are trying to rank our system to, we, unfortunately, do not know how to evaluate these page factors correctly and give you an accurate ranking estimate.
Q3: The first result looks great! How is the AKZ score so low? ”
C3: Ahrefs AKZ score is based on the weighted average of the referenced domain names based on the top 10 ranking pages.
Therefore, it allows you to estimate how many rival domain names you need to be in the top 10 results.

Organic Keywords in Ahrefs SEO Metrics

When you paste any website, subfolder, or URL into Site Explorer, you’ll see the total number of keywords ranked in organic search results:
How is this number obtained?
We check that your website is included in the top 100 search results of 605 Million keywords in the Ahrefs database and make the results available to you.
The 605M means VERY too many keywords to check, yet it’s much less than the actual number of people searching on Google…
This number seems to be very low, especially given that 16% of Google’s daily searches have never been done before.
Therefore, the number of organic keywords you see in Ahrefs will likely be less than the number of keywords you target.
In addition, Ahrefs updates the keyword database monthly with newly discovered search queries, so you should consider that.
They also remove search queries from the database if a word’s popularity drops to zero, meaning it’s no longer searched, it’s painful but true
This means that the number of organic keywords they report for your website will simply increase or decrease as they expand the database.
This does not mean that your Web site is ranked better in searches.
But that means that the organic keyword chart should show “leap her every month as the Ahrefs database grows, right?

No, there is no such leap.
Because they say that every time they expand the database, they rebuild the chart of organic keywords to correct this situation.
As a result, you don’t see any confusing monthly jump in Ahrefs.
Must read » What is SEO and how does SEO work?
The last and most important thing to note about metrics for organic keywords is that it is almost always country-specific.
Take a look at the First Pages report, for example:
The number of keywords shown here is for the United States only.
If you want to see this data for all countries, select the appropriate setting from the drop-down list.

Organic Traffic in Ahrefs SEO Tools

This Ahrefs metric estimates how much organic search traffic the target website and its subsection or webpage receives each month.
How are these values ​​calculated?

1. Ahrefs finds all the keywords in the target’s ranking.
2. It determines how much traffic the target receives from each of these keywords. (these sites are based on your ranking position and your estimated CTR for that position.)
3. Then the system collects all these numbers and brings them together.

Recently, people have often asked us why the predicted organic search traffic for websites in Ahrefs does not match what they see in Google Analytics.
This is a good question and the answer is quite simple: it is impossible for all variables in the traffic estimation formula to be 100% identical to Google.
As I said, two different systems, two different results. It’s quite normal.
Nevertheless, if possible, consider Google data, Ahrefs’ data is based on a robust mathematical process, but never as good as the platform owner can provide predictions or rather facts.
Let me explain why this is the case for each variable.

Search Volume in Ahrefs SEO metrics

As I said above, this metric is the rounded off of a 30-month average.
I’ll write an article for you later that explains that the search volume is actually an incorrect metric.
According to Ahrefs, the position of a page in Google search results can change at any time, even if they don’t take personalization and other things into account.
You can go to 5th place in the morning and go down to 8th until noon.
Only the most popular keywords are updated hourly in the Ahrefs database.
Less popular keywords are updated daily, and the least popular keywords are updated only once a month.
CTR: As far as I know, Ahrefs is the only tool in the market to create a unique CTR curve for almost every keyword.
Sample:

Content marketing institute meets the first place when the keyword “marketing content marketing” and “content marketing institute” are searched.
In both searches, this site (contentmarketinginstitute.com) appears.
Please note that both of these searches have very different search volumes. While the keyword “content marketing receives 31,000 searches per month, the content marketing institute receives only 4,400 searches – which means almost 85% less search volume!
However, even if the search volume is small, this website receives approximately the same traffic from both searches.
While the clickthrough rate for the keyword “Content Marketing is around 12%, there is a high clickthrough rate of 52% for the“ content marketing institute ”search.
The second keyword is the search for a rooted name.
In this case, people prefer contentmarketinginstitute.com pages more than other sites.
How do I know that?
The unique Ahrefs CTR curve for each of these keywords enables us to calculate this data.
NOTE: Ahrefs has some keywords (mostly low volume) that do not generate a CTR curve due to lack of data.
However, using a click-based CTR estimate is not 100% accurate, and if we use it, we will add an additional unreliable, inconsistent value to our total organic traffic estimate.
One last variable left, let’s move on.

Keywords in Ahrefs SEO Tools

This is something I have explained above in the “organic keywords” section.
Ahrefs’s keyword database is quite large, yet there is no way to know all the search queries people search on Google.
However, you should take into account the organic traffic estimates in Ahrefs as they should be, ie as estimates.
The results you see in Google Analytics will always be slightly different from Ahrefs.
One final point:
Must read » How to Increase Blog Traffic With Zero SEO Knowledge
While the Ahrefs organic traffic criterion doesn’t exactly show how much organic traffic a site receives, it works incredibly well to compare traffic to sites of the same type.
In summary, if you want to see how much organic search traffic your website receives and compare that traffic data to competing sites, then Ahrefs is what you’re looking for. It fulfills this task completely.

Traffic Value in Ahrefs SEO metrics

This metric, if the traffic of the site was purchased through Google Ads, shows the organic traffic value of the site, that is, it simply collects the Cost Per Click in Google Ads of each word you receive from traffic and ve if you wanted to get paid that traffic from Google Ads bu he says.
You may be a little confused, let me explain:
Here is one of the keywords: “basic design principles”:
Using this keyword, you can see that we receive approximately 561 visits per month from organic search, and it has a CPC of about $ 0.15 (Cost-per-Click).
So if we get 561 visits by offering this keyword in Google Ads, it will cost us $ 22.
However, this data only in one country (Turkey) and is only valid for a keyword.
What if we assume that the keyword is valid in 170 countries and that there are more than 10,000 keywords, and then we put all the numbers together?
Answer: We would get the Traffic Value.
You can see it here:
This data is just an estimate, as in organic traffic measurements.
If you were to bid for this keyword in Google Ads, it wouldn’t cost you exactly $ 6 per click.
This is because Google Ads actually calculates clicks for an auction.
Advertisers can always change their bids (or start or stop their ads), and so prices are volatile and tend to fluctuate.
Must read » Google indexed pages checker: Search Console (Step by step guide)
Therefore, it uses CPC (Cost Per Click) to calculate this metric.
As I said, Ahrefs Traffic Value is an estimate and you should only use it for reference and comparison purposes.

URL Value (UR) in Ahrefs SEO metric

URL Rating (UR) indicates the strength of a page’s backlink profile on a logarithmic scale from 0 to 100, the larger the number, the stronger the ranking.
When calculating this metric, both internal and external links are considered (but the weight percentages we use when considering are different).

NOTE: “Logarithmic” means that it is easier to upgrade your page from 20 UR to 30 UR than from 70 UR to 80 UR.

URL Rating (UR) is highly consistent with Google rankings, which means higher UR pages tend to rank higher in organic search results.
If you know Google’s PageRank formula, it’s easy to understand Ahrefs’ URL Rating (UR).
This is because they use the same basic PageRank principles to calculate the Ahrefs URL Rating (UR).

• We count links between pages;
• We respect nofollow;
• We have a softening factor for data;
• We crawl the web on a large scale (the more crawled websites, the more accurate the results).

Translation: URL Rating (UD) is an almost perfect way to measure the “link popularity of a page, so that’s why it provides very good consistency with Google rankings.
However, please do not consider URL Rating as a direct PageRank alternative. Google’s PageRank formula has improved a lot since its inception, however, Ahrefs’ UD remains simple in this comparison.
If we were to make this formula more complex, updating the BILLIONS of pages in our index more often would be very expensive – which would have to be transferred to the customer.

IMPORTANT: I ​​see that many people say things such as the UNI and EW of this area..

That’s wrong to say.
A UD is a single-page level metric, and AAD is a general measure at the domain level.
For example, if you searched a website (domain name) in Ahrefs’s Site Navigator and saw a URL Rating, this rating applies only to the home page in that domain.

Domain Name Value (DR) in Ahrefs SEO metric

Domain Name Rating (DR) indicates the strength of a page’s backlink profile on a logarithmic scale from 0 to 100, the larger the number, the stronger the rating.

NOTE: Google has long since denied the use of any domain-wide link metrics in the ranking algorithm, but we have no idea how this metric is actually made by Google.

However, the current system works in a similar way to the original PageRank calculation. (as long as you do the site-wide calculation, not as a page).
The Domain Rating (DR) objective is to evaluate the “link popularity on the website.
Therefore, links from sites with high Link popularity are often more valuable than sites with low “Link popularity..”
“Link popularity” (Domain Name Assessment) is also a useful metric to estimate the potential of a website to receive search traffic from Google.
How do we know that?

• We examined the relationship between Domain Name Assessment (EAD) and organic search traffic to cover over 200,000 domain names and found that they were in direct proportion to each other.
• If you want to better understand this metric and all the usage cases in SEO,

But let’s do a short question and answer to answer some of the most popular questions:
Q1: 10 The top 10 ranking pages for my target keyword belong to very high DR websites. If the DRs of my website are 30 – 50 points lower, is there any chance of exceeding them? ”
A1: “You have a chance to leave them behind. First, Google has verified that it doesn’t have a criterion that covers the domain. Second, the experience of thousands of SEO experts says that if you create better-quality backlinks than they do, your page can cross “big” sites. ”
Q2: Why is DR higher or lower than UR?
A2: Although both rating methods are based on backlinks, it is worth noting that they are calculated differently and cannot be directly compared. DR looks at the quality and quantity of domains that link to your website, and URL Evaluation (UR) looks at the nature and quantity of web pages that link to the website you’re researching. As you can see, it’s totally different. One is the entire site, and the other is completely single page-oriented.
Q3: Should I only receive DRs from high-value sites? Will links from low-density sites do me any harm? ”
A3: “As a general rule, links from a high Domain Name value tend to bring more value than low DR links. Logically, high DR sites are more likely to have high UR pages. However, you can also find high-value UR pages on low-value sites (DR).
However, links from low DR sites will not harm you in any way. Domain Name Rating (DR) is not an indication that the website is bad, so links from low DR sites should not be considered worthless ”.
Q4: I didn’t lose any of my backlinks. Why did the DR fall? ”
A4: Because other sites have earned more Backlinks than yours. Think of it this way: When a DR 100 website has more Backlinks, it cannot upgrade to DR101. Remember, we make the rankings between 0-100. Since those sites cannot rise any further, when any website that has reached any final value rises more, we are downloading all other websites 1 to synchronize the values. This is a very clear explanation of why you might see a decrease in your DR while your backlinks are still the same.
Q5: How can my DR be lower than my competitors even if I have more backlinks?
A5: Please note that for DR, Ahrefs takes into account both the quantity and quality of backlinks. We also need to look at how many unique sites are linking the domain. If you have a backlink that is bridged from one site to the other five domains, the DR26 domain will have a greater effect than a bridged link from the DR73 domain to the 5BIN domain. ”

Ahrefs Ranking (AR) in Ahrefs SEO Tools

If you rank all the websites in the world according to the strength of your Backlink profiles, you get the Ahrefs Rank (AR).
Therefore, Ahrefs Ranking # 1 is the website with the strongest backlink profile (Facebook.com), # 2 is the second most powerful (Twitter.com), # 3 is the third most powerful (YouTube.com), and so on. continues.
You can see the full list of fields here by ordering them in Ahrefs Ranking.
Must read » Easiest Way to Prevent WordPress From Generating Image Sizes
Here are some common questions we receive about the Ahrefs Ranking:
Q1: My backlink profile is growing, but my Ahrefs Ranking is falling. Why?”
A1: “Because other websites are getting new Backlinks faster than you. The situation here is almost the same as I explained above about this drop in your DR. ”
Q2: Why did AR decrease by a million? Is there a problem?”
A2: As you go down, the Ahrefs Rank changes much faster. Think; There are a handful of websites with millions of backlinks in the world (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc.) In the Ahrefs Ranking, these 3-5 sites are not enough to cross each other. This number should be in quantities and sizes you cannot imagine.
However, at the end of the scale, we have many websites with little or no backlinks. Let’s say one of the sites with backlinks 10 won a new Backlink and the Backlink value was 11. This is enough to take down thousands of points from other sites whose Backlink value remains 10.
And if your Ahrefs Ranking has dropped despite the fact that your Backlink hasn’t been lost, I’m sorry, but it means that one million sites are expanding their Backlink profiles, while yours remains the same. ”

Link Directories: Instant, Current and History

When you browse Backlink reports in Ahrefs Site Explorer, you may notice the “Instant / Current / History” sections that change some values.
What is the difference between these link indexes?
As you know, Ahrefs scans the Internet 24/7, scans all newly discovered sites every 15-20 minutes, and adds these newly discovered links to the Backlink index.
However, we not only scan new pages, but we also re-scan the old ones. When we do this, we discover that some previously valid connections are no longer valid.
These links are immediately removed from the “Live” directory but are kept in the “Recent Deleted” directory for 90 days. If they are reused during this time, they are transferred back to the Instant index.
As for our “history” directory, this includes all links that our bots see as “Instant“.
But what’s that gonna do?
Thanks to the “History” directory, I can see that a friend has a link from an article published in a visitor’s post, but let’s say it was removed for some reason.
Since this article is still published on his blogs, my friend can investigate why they removed the link and maybe convince them to restore the article.
But that’s not the only case: You can also use the History index to investigate how a potential customer’s Backlink profile changes over time.
More subjectively, you can also use it to find bad links that have been removed.
Why do the reported SEO metrics sometimes differ between different tools in Ahrefs?
Paste one of Ahrefs blog posts into Ahrefs’s Site Navigator.
Field Name Value (AAD) [87].
Cited Domain Names: [287].
Organic Traffic [97].
Now let’s view the same blog post in Ahrefs’s Content Navigator.
Field Name Value (AAD) [86].
Cited Domain Names: [279].
Organic Traffic [83].
Although the figures are very similar, you can see that they are different. So why is that? ”
The point is that every different tool in Ahrefs uses different directories (databases).
In Ahrefs, for example, we have two keyword indexes (for Keywords Explorer and Site Explorer), three-link directories (Instant, Current, History), and one content index (for Content Explorer).
If you look for something in the Content Navigator, you will search the Ahrefs content directory.
If you search for a word in the Keyword Navigator, you are searching from the words in our database.
When you analyze a site in the Site Navigator, you will search from the data that we index (organic traffic data) and SERP (Search Engine Result Page).
We need to make some calls from Content Navigator to other databases to show domain names and metrics that provide reference and organic traffic to each other.
However, the fact that it works in this way actually slows down the system. The way to overcome this is to store these numbers in memory.
In fact, this is something we do in most of our reports.
For example, when you check the top 10 results for a keyword with the SERP Overview, the data you see comes from a memorized version of the Search Engine Result Page.
However, there is no link or traffic data in this directory, and we need to extract data from a lot of databases to create a single report.
I repeat, however, that this is very slow, so we’re just buffering the data directly.
However, they often update our cache data, so there is not much inconsistency in “instant” data.

Wrapping up on How To Use Some SEO Terms in Ahrefs SEO Metrics

These are the most curious Ahrefs metrics that come to our minds and we strive to answer.
I hope that this article will help you better understand Ahrefs’ tools, data, and really understand the insides and take action.
If you have additional questions about the metrics you see in Ahrefs, comment below.
I’d be happy to help you.
If you want to do us a favor, you can share this article with your loved ones on Facebook and Twitter.
If you like this post, you can share it with your friends on your Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn profile, you can support us!
I also recommend that you read our article 10 Tools I Use For Search Engine Optimization (SEO).