How can you use search metrics in GoDaddy Auctions.
Domains with SEO have become so valuable to platforms that serve up expiring domains that a few of the big players have started to integrate SEO metrics into their dashboards. Namecheap got there first (I’m pretty sure) and now the industry’s biggest auction platform has added these metrics as well.
If you regularly look through GoDaddy’s firehose of daily dropping domains on a third-party platform like ExpiredDomains.net, you may have missed some recent updates to the metrics that GoDaddy’s auction marketplace displays.
Here’s a look:
The addition of “Majestic TF,” “Majestic CF,” “Backlinks,” and “Referring Domains” are all new additions.
In this post, I’ll break down what they mean and how to assign a weight to each of them.
Majestic TF is a metric from Majestic.com (nice domain name!) where the TF = trust flow. What does that even mean? Well here it is straight from Majestic:
Trust Flow represents the quality of links that point to URLs and websites. A web page with higher Trust Flow than Citation Flow will usually have good-quality links.
So the higher the trust flow number, the higher quality the backlink profile a domain has.
Majestic CF stands for citation flow, and here’s what that measures:
Citation Flow is a score which reflects the quantity of links that point to any given website. Citation Flow does not care whether a link is of good-quality, or poor quality.
So this is a measurement of pure quantity, full stop.
The number of backlinks and the number of referring domains are pretty self-explanatory, but just in case:
You can have one referring domain, but that referring domain can generate hundreds or thousands of backlinks.
An example:
Say you get a link from ToasterReviews .net (a made-up site) that mentions your toaster product in its review. You have 1 referring domain and 1 backlink.
Now let’s say that toaster review site has 200 pages/posts, and instead of linking to you in one of them, it puts a link to your site in the sidebar (which, in this example, appears on every page and post).
Now you have 1 referring domain and 200 backlinks.
Which of these metrics should you pay attention to?
You can ignore number of backlinks. If a site has eight million backlinks from two referring domains, the eight million is less valuable a metric of the intrinsic SEO power a domain has than the two referring domains. This is something I see a lot of domain investors get wrong when talking about SEO in the context of why a domain is valuable.
Similarly, the citation flow metric doesn’t translate to a very valuable metric. If a site has 10,000 really awful, spammy links the trust flow will be super low but the citation flow will be high (in theory).
This is a PSA for you domain investors: ALL SEO metrics can be manipulated to be higher than they should be, but it is harder to manipulate TF as compared to CF — though it can absolutely be done.
So when you’re looking for domains with a high SEO value, sort by referring domains or trust flow and go from there. Don’t be distracted by the other two metrics that, while definitely providing valuable information to experienced SEOs doing deep SEO research, are of little value to you in your search to acquire portfolio-worthy domain names.