Web Development Magazine

Why Page Strength sucks?

Lately there was discussion on Digital Points forum, about Page Strength tool developed by www.seomoz.com. I think about it for a while and found few reasons why i think this is the most useless SEO tool ever created for web development community.

First of all it is paid to use this tool. You can use it three times daily for free, but imagine that you can view Google PageRank for only three pages each day. This would be ridiculous, however it would make a lot more sense to pay to view PageRank, then to pay to view PageStrength, because PageRank is something that only Google has got, it is their indicator of page power, while PageStrength is nothing more then, oscillator based on someone else information.

The funny thing is, all the information you need to calculate PageStrength, you can get completely for free, as many times a day as you wish, so probably what you are paying for when it comes to SeoMoz PageStrength is … calculation, because they can’t take money for showing you your domain: link popularity, Alexa stats or anything else. So what they actually have to offer is very simple algorithm, which unfortunately can be very easily manipulated, i saw sites increasing their PageStrength by 1 each day, this is not something that can be done with PageRank or even Alexa stats.

I understand, getting this data automatically for every calculation uses SeoMoz bandwidth, so they limit to three searches a day, but everyone can get needed data manually and submit it to them, so all they would need to do is calculate PageStrength. I know it is a bit silly solution but so is PageStrength in my opinion.

I am also wondering, what is actually SeoMoz measuring with their algorithm, we know that PageRank measures, on their websites they write that this tool tells you:

• The Relative Importance and Visibility of a Webpage
• The Potential Strength and Ability of a Page to Rank in the Search Engines
• Data on Popularity, Links & Mentions of the Page Across the Web

Two words used there are: “Relative” and “Potential”, this words are not related to word “fact” in any way, so PageStrength is nothing more then assumption, based on what? Few indicators that may not really be important, and do not relate to real importance and visibility of website.

One more thing as i checked now you can make only one PageStrength search a day, not 3 as i wrote earlier. If you want more then you need to pay 49$ each month, for what? I leave the answer to this question to you.