Keith Nallawalla
I’ve been working in SEO for well over 10 years now and have worked with a lot of big brands as well as hundreds of small businesses. Whilst I work at one of Melbourne’s Best SEO Agencies and have access to some great paid tools, there are certainly ones that I don’t have access to or can’t always access due to seat limits. I guess it’s finally time to write an article about the free SEO tools I love, if not for anyone else other than myself, as I often forget to bookmark good ones when I find them or forget the name when I’m not at my own computer.
Free Moz DA & Spam Score Checker (Moz Alternative)
At a previous job, the Moz suite of tools was one of the few SEO Tools I had access to, so I’m quite stuck in their eco-system for measuring website quality with their DA (Domain Authority), PA (Page Authority) and SS (Spam Score) Metrics. I used to love the Mozbar Chrome plugin which would show me these metrics for a site, plus highlight follow/nofollow links and give me quick access to the heading tags. It was just a really handy tool. But these days, I can never get the Moz toolbar to work. It has caused me so much frustration that the brand is pretty much dead to me now.
That being said, I still care about their metrics, even though they are only a third-party tool and there’s a lot of SEOs out there who dismiss the value of this data, I’d still rather attempt to work within some sort of measured guidelines than go in blind with my link building, even though metrics like Domain Authority are not the real metric Google uses to assess things, it’s a universally understood metric all SEOs understand and most clients will be able to grasp.
What is Domain Authority?
This is Moz’s rating from 1-100 on a logarithmic scale of the website based mostly on quality links to the whole website. The higher your DA, the higher your site is likely to rank for its content of similar quality compared to another website for a given search phrase.
Website SEO Checker has a great free tool that gives you the following metrics all in one go, allowing you to check up to 3 websites at a time. As it actually gives you more than just your DA & Spam Score, this has to go to the top of my list as I seriously use this tool every day, even on weekends. This site is a great complimentary tool if SEMRush is the only the paid license you can afford. Here are the metrics it shows with 3 of my domains as examples:
- DA – Domain Authority from Moz – Overall strength of the whole site.
- PA – Page Authority from Moz – Similar to DA but specific to each page.
- TB – Total Backlinks from Moz – But this metric is broken and links you to the Domain Overview in SEMRush that gives far more data than what is shown here, but you need a SEMRush license. Ignore this metric.
- QB – Quality Backlinks from Moz – This metric is also broken and links to the Domain Overview in SEMRush. Ignore this metric.
- PQ – Quality Backlinks from Moz – This metric is broken as well and links to you to the Domain Overview in SEMRush again. Again ignore this.
- MT – Moz Trust from Moz – This metric looks like it works, but also links through to SEMRush.
- SS – Spam Score from Moz – This works, but doesn’t always load data. If that happens try again. Ignore that this is linking through to SEMRush.
- OS – Off-Page SEO Score – I’m not clear what this is, but looks plausible. I don’t use this data for anything myself.
- Age – This shows how long the site has been online for but doesn’t show data for all websites. This is handy to know when link building as it helps identify dodgy PBN sites.
- Alexa – Alexa Global Ranking – I’ve never really cared for Alexa metrics, it doesn’t seem as relevant in Australia. I prefer Ahrefs Rank, which this site does not help you with.
- TC – Alex Traffic Country – This sometimes shows flags for countries but doesn’t for my sites.
- TF – Trust Flow from Majestic – I love the Trust Flow metric I’ll explain more about that later.
- CF – Citation Flow from Majestic – Related to the above.
- IX – Indexed URLs from Majestic – This counts how many URLs Majestic knows about that are indexed in Google. If a website has lots of pages indexed in Google, that’s a good sign!
- DF- Dofollow Backlinks from Majestic – this is a great metric to have free access to.
- BL – Backlinks from Majestic – This will show you a sample of your backlinks plus Majestic Trust Flow and Citation Flow data. If you want to see more, it takes you into SEMRush.
- DH – History of Domain Authority from Moz – Click this to see a graph of the Domain Authority for a website over time. This is really interesting and a great free way to see if your link building has worked.
It looks like I need to do more link building for my own blog!
The only downside to this tool is that if you use it a lot, you’ll end up having to do a lot of capture codes, sometimes I have to do up to 5 in a row. It can become tedious, but it’s far less tedious than trying to get Moz’s toolbar to work consistently. Occasionally, this tool will fail to load data, in which case I’ll use Robin Gupta’s DA tool, except that doesn’t seem to show Spam Score.
Best Free Majestic Alternative
What is Majestic Trust Flow?
Think of Trust Flow as the quality of websites linking to this site, the trustworthiness of a site. Major news sites with millions of backlinks will have high TF metrics. A local business who is rarely linked to from any big websites will likely have a low TF. This is on a scale of 1-100 and the higher the better.
What is Majestic Citation Flow?
Citation Flow relates to the volume of links pointing to your site. Whilst a great volume of different sites linking to you is generally a good thing, it should be
Whilst I have a paid account with Majestic, sometimes I’m happy to just use the Website SEO Checker above as it gives the high-level data I like for Trust Flow and Citation Flow. However, when link building to grow the Trust Flow of a site, I do prefer to log in properly to ensure that links are from relevant websites with relevant Topical Trust Flow.
As this is a marketing blog, a lot of our backlinks relate to business or real estate, which makes sense. If it was full of “gambling” or “adult” Topical Trust Flow from linking domains, we might have a problem. Majestic has a lot of great link-building features and is worth paying for. I just love using that free website to get the high-level stats for both Moz and Majestic at once.
I will add more of my favourite free SEO tools in the future.
