iGB Affiliate 51 JunJul | Page 36

TRAFFIC Figure 5: Citation flow comparison The Venetian 43 Wynn Las Vegas Resort 43 Aria Resort and Casino 42 Bellagio 41 Mandalay Bay Resort & Casino 41 MGM Grand Casino 40 The Mirage 40 Luxor 37 Excalibur Hotel & Casino 36 Circus Circus 36 Figure 6: Trust flow comparison The Venetian 67 Wynn Las Vegas Resort 66 The Mirage 61 Mandalay Bay Resort & Casino 60 MGM Grand Casino 57 Luxor 55 Circus Circus 55 53 Aria Resort and Casino 52 Excalibur Hotel & Casino 49 Bellagio Figure 7: Number of referring domains 0 2000 4000 6000 8000 10000 Bellagio MGM Grand Casino The Venetian Mandalay Bay Resort & Casino Wynn Las Vegas Resort Number of referring domains The Mirage Luxor Excalibur Hotel & Casino Circus Circus Aria Resort and Casino 32 iGB Affiliate Issue 51 JUNE/JULY 2015 12000 signals, including linking root domains and total number of links. Figure 4 shows a strong correlation with the visibility of each of these sites, which helps to validate the Searchmetrics data. The most important point to draw out here is that a site can have very high authority, but less search visibility due to its site architecture (less pages in index, for example), on-page optimisation or technical setup. This would appear to be the case for Mandalay Bay, which ranks highly for all domain metrics, but eighth lowest out of the 10 casinos for visibility. Citation Flow is a metric from Majestic, and predicts how influential a URL might be by focusing on the authority being passed to the site from all of its inbound links. The Venetian comes out on top for Citation Flow, and this is backed up when you look at how many sites are linking to it (covered later), interestingly MGM Grand ranks 6th here. MGM Grand and the Venetian have a similar number of sites linking to them, so this would infer that Majestic scores the links coming to MGM at a lower authority than those pointing to the Venetian. Trust Flow is a relatively new metric, also from Majestic, and one which we at TMI use more and more in our analysis of sites. This metric predicts how trustworthy a domain is based on how trustworthy the sites are that link to it. The big take away from this is how badly the Bellagio scores here (see Figure 6), ranking the lowest of the 10 casinos we analyzed. With it being No 1 in our analysis for global search visibility, this is definitely something to be concerned about. It infers that the inbound links are of far lower quality, and so are less trustworthy. This does not necessarily mean they are spam, but just that they are comparatively lower quality compared to the other casinos. Ahref ref domains Majref domains The number and authority of unique domains linking to a casino will play a big role in how that casino performs in the SERPs. We’ve looked at data from Ahrefs and Majestic, the two main tools we rely on as an agency for inbound link data. Both tools rank all 10 sites in the same order