Majestic Metrics and Disavow Tool

[itsjustme2]

Trying to drill down into the relationship between Majestic metrics, especially the citation flow and trust flow, and their relation to the disavow tool.

2 Questions

1. If (and its only speculation) the disavow tool changes dofollow links to nofollow links, then would it be correct to assume that the number of links from Majestic won't change after using the disavow tool? (again, assuming for the sake of argument, the site in question does not receive any new links)

2. Does Majestic read the formally dofollow links as nofollow, once the disallow.txt is sumbitted to Google.

For example, can a webmaster watch, over time, the citation flow and trust flow of the site change on Majestic, as the Majestic bot digests the consequences of the disallow.txt.

More specifically, if a disallow requests the nofollowing of links from 1500 domains with trust flow of <20, should the webmaster be able to watch the Majestic metrics of a site with a current trust flow of 30 increase to "whatever" (31 or 41 depending on the math and the % of requested disavow links to total links) as the links from the sites with lower trust flow change from nofollow to dofollow?

There's got to be an easier way to check, or metrics to interpret, if the disallow tool actually helps, rather than waiting six or seven months for Google to crawl the web, recalculate a site's metrics to determine if it filters through the algo, and then wait for the updated algo button to be pressed.

If disallow does not work, waiting six or eight months to discover that it does not work sounds a bit unappealing.

[aristotle]

In my understanding, Google's algorithm simply begins disregarding a backlink after it's disavowed. In other words, the backlink no longer has any effect on the site's rankings. This probably doesn't happen immediately, but only after the backlink is re-crawled and verified. The "nofollow" isn't a real tag, but merely an internal book-keeping mechanism.

[martinibuster]

aristotle, now take that thought to where the OP wants it to go. Once Google disavows those links internally, the OP wants to know, how does Majestic compensate for the Google Internal nofollowed links within the Majestic metrics calculation?

[phranque]

majestic doesn't know about the disavow list you submitted to google.
it's not going to recalculate anything using inaccessible data.
you would need an external tool that takes majestic data and your disavow list into account.

[martinibuster]

Phranque, correct me if I'm missing something, but the way I understand the OPs question, I don't think 3rd party tools can help the OP. The OP is discussing Majestic's proprietary Citation Flow metric (roughly, the quantity of links a site has pointed to it) and Trust Flow metric (the quality of those links), and how Majestic might take into account the widescale disavowals of links that are internal at Google but not apparent outside of Google.

Article on the Majestic blog: [blog.majesticseo.com]

Finding the Trust Ratio of a site

Before I go into how to find the trust ratio of a site, you must first understand exactly how Citation Flow and Trust Flow work. Dixon’s article on Flow Metrics [blog.majesticseo.com] explains this terminology. But the main thing to remember is that Citation Flow is link juice and the Trust Flow is how close those links are to trustworthy, authoritative sources.

For the crap sites with poor metrics to begin with, Majestics proprietary algorithm will likely catch them and assign them a proper score.

But for non-crap sites publishing articles that have been flagged as unnatural, Majestic has no idea the links are considered bad by Google, much less if they have been disavowed. So there will be a margin of error if you are using Majestic's metrics as a window into how Google evaluates a siet. Actually, there must be an error because it's an opinion, Majestic versus Google's black box. While Majestic never overtly claims its metrics are an analog to PageRank or that they have cracked Google's algorithm, there is an implication that it is when they make statements asserting they are giving you an idea how "how effective a URL is." Effective at what? Ranking in Google? Only Google can tell you that.

The bottom line is that, like other metrics that purport to give you an idea of "how effective a URL is," including Google's own toolbar (because Google doesn't reveal their secrets), in my opinion they aren't reliable tools for making business decisions related to how to rank on Google.

[phranque]

the 3rd party tool could only make a new guess based on additional information not available when majestic made its guess.
however the 3rd part tool wouldn't have the link graph available or the algorithm to recalculate flow.
in other words there is no such tool until you can provide your your disavow list to majestic.
note that majestic is about the link graph and the only content that's really in the equation is anchor text.
links and anchor text are only subsets of the ranking algorithm.

1. If (and its only speculation) the disavow tool changes dofollow links to nofollow links, then would it be correct to assume that the number of links from Majestic won't change after using the disavow tool? (again, assuming for the sake of argument, the site in question does not receive any new links)

2. Does Majestic read the formally dofollow links as nofollow, once the disallow.txt is sumbitted to Google.

1. yes
2. no

[itsjustme2]

phranque answered the questions

1. yes
2. no

and I'm inclined to interpret it that way also.

Thus far, the only metric I can think for evaluating Majestic and the disavow tool is for those sites with manual penalties that use Majestic in order to help determine what gets placed in the disavow. The penalty sites then report
success when resubmitting reconsideration requests.

That indicates, to me at least, the penalty site crossed some algo threshold that approximates Majestic's trust flow factor.

At least I think its the trust flow factor because the comparative research I've done in my niche indicates that trust flow higher than citation flow correlates strongly with page one and page two serps.

However, because sites that do not receive manual penalties still can be below whatever the algo marks as its trust flow factor, they also drop way out of the serps.

I think I just read where about 80% of Penguin affected sites have never recovered.

Because there is no way that Majestic can read any of a sites links that have been marked disallowed, there is no way to read Majestic metrics (citation flow and trust flow) to determine whether a non-manual penalty site has recovered or will recover.

say you have 10 links, 5 with a trust flow of 50, 5 with a trust flow of 0, for a total of 250 trust flow units or an average of 25 trust flow for the site.

Disallowing the five links with 0 trust flow (don't count them) then leave 5 links with trust flow fifty, thereby raising the aggregate trust flow of the site to 50.

It does not appear that Majestic metrics can read that new "50" trust flow ranking because they cannot read the google disallow.txt or determine which of the links or domains linking to a site are disallowed or not counted.

.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 8:26 am (utc) on Jan 10, 2014]
[edit reason] removed note regarding double post (fixed) [/edit]

[itsjustme2]

quick update....

after using majestic as a foundation for redoing the disavow tool, majestic did indeed change the trust flow and citation flow for my site...

fwiw,
trust flow 56, citation flow 36
it now matches up with Moz Analytics score: 53 61

there's no change in the serps,