Domain Discounting

Effectively ignore blogspam, run-of-site links and site-wide banners with Domain Discounting, a customizable setting that allows you to discount multiple links coming from the same domain (known as the Decay Factor).

The Decay Factor is the discount applied to each subsequent link from the same website. To see why this is necessary, consider two alternative scenarios.

• Scenario 1: Site XYZ has 1,000 incoming links from 1,000 unique domains.
• Scenario 2: Site XYZ has 1,000 incoming links from a single domain.

Most SEOs would consider scenario 1 to have a greater positive impact on search rankings for site XYZ than scenario 2. Domain discounting allows you to factor this into your scoring calculations.

Use the following Domain Discount settings to alter the manner in which competitors' backlinks are scored:

• High – Every backlinking domain counts as a single link for scoring purposes, regardless of how many actual links may exist on that site. This reflects the most cautious approach to SEO, but it may be too limiting for many applications.
• Moderate – Every subsequent link after the first is discounted by 15%. Thus the second link is counted as .85 for scoring purposes, the third link as .72 and so on. This has the effect of discounting 100 actual links to about 7 in the signal charts. This is believed to most closely model how the search engines weight backlinks.
• None – Every actual link is counted. This setting is not recommended, as site-wide banner ads, footer links, blogrolls, etc. will be overly weighted within the signal charts. Most modern search engines will not count all links on a given site equally.