Site Performance provides data specific to your website — all of the metrics displayed, including social metrics, are referring to that website's performance. This is broken up into three separate sections: SEO Metrics, Site Metrics and Social Metrics.
SEO Metrics
SEO Metrics are largely pulled from Moz and Majestic, via Research Central. Each metric deals with how your website performs in link building and in perception, according to carefully designed equations from both services. This data is a predictor of how a website might perform in search engine rankings. Unlike some of the other data in Site Performance, SEO metrics update once every 30 days.
- External Backlinks (Majestic): The total number of backlinks pointing to your website as determined from Majestic's Historic Index.
- External Backlinks (Moz): The total number of backlinks pointing to your website as determined from Moz's Open Site Explorer tool.
- Citation Flow: Citation Flow is a Flow Metric from Majestic, which weights your website by the number of times a given URL or domain is cited (or linked to) by external pages.
- Trust Flow: Trust Flow is a Flow Metric from Majestic, which predicts trustworthiness based on how trusted the external websites linking to you are.
- Domain Authority: Domain Authority represents Moz's best prediction about how a website will perform in search engine rankings. This prediction is calculated by combining all other Moz link metrics (linking root domains, number of total links, mozRank, mozTrust and more) into a single score.
- mozRank: MozRank represents a link popularity score and reflects the importance of any given web page on the internet. Pages earn MozRank by the number and quality of other pages that link to them; the higher the quality of the incoming links, the higher the MozRank.
- mozTrust: MozTrust is Moz's global link trust score. It is similar to MozRank but, rather than measuring link popularity, it measures link trust. Receiving links from sources which have inherent trust, such as the homepages of major university websites or certain governmental web pages, is a strong trust endorsement.
Site Metrics
Site Metrics are derived using data from Site Auditor and Google. You do not need to run Site Auditor in order to gather this information – it will automatically populate when you navigate to Site Performance. This data mainly relates to the ways that your website interacts with search engines, including how prepared your domain is for crawling.
- Load Time: The length of time it takes for your website to load, in seconds. The quicker a page loads, the better chance a user will stay on the page. Pages with lengthy load times can bounce from the page, losing the visit.
- Page Speed: The Google Page Speed score for your website, calculated from a series of variables like the use of CSS and whether or not your images are optimized. More information on Google Page Speed criteria can be found in the Desktop Page Speed section of Site Auditor.
- Preparedness: A list of factors that may impact whether or not your website can be optimally crawled by search engines. Site Performance gives a pass/fail metric on the following:
- www Redirect: Your page redirects from www.domain.com to domain.com.
- robots.txt: Your page has a robots.txt file that blocks unwanted automated traffic.
- Google Analytics Integration: Your page has Google Analytics running on it.
- Crawlability: Whether or not your page has disallow rules that would prevent search engines from crawling your pages.
- Malware Detection: Whether or not your website contains potentially malicious software.
- Domain Registration: The number of days remaining until your domain expires. Domains with expirations that are further in the future are seen as more likely to have credible information for search engines. The older a domain is, the more authority it has with search engines.
- 404 "Not Found" Links: The total number of dead links discovered on your website. Links generally direct to a 404 error because a page has been moved or deleted without being properly redirected.
The third section in Site Performance deals with social media. Social Metrics displays information about how your website is being communicated in several different social networks, including Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and Klout.
This does not measure data from your profiles on these social networks — only your domain's performance on them, in the form of shares and other engagements.
- Social Integration: A determination of whether or not your website or brand is represented on five social networks: Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn and Pinterest. This is discovered via Site Auditor, which crawls your domain's home page looking for widgets or links for these social media tools.
- Twitter Likes: The number of times that the Twitter account detected by Site Auditor (if detected) has liked other Tweets.
- Facebook Shares: The number of times pages from the domain have been shared on Facebook.
- Facebook Comments: The number of Facebook comments associated with pages from your domain.
- Google +1's: The total number of +1's your domain has received from Google+ users.
- Pinterest Shares: The total number of times pages from the domain have been shared on Pinterest.
- LinkedIn Shares: The total number of times pages from the domain have been shared on LinkedIn.
- StumbleUpon Views: The number of times pages from the domain seen through StumbleUpon's viewer window.
Additional information about each metric in all three sections can be discovered by clicking the information icon next to each metric in Site Performance.