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Inrank: Understanding Oncrawl's SEO Visibility Metric
Inrank: Understanding Oncrawl's SEO Visibility Metric

Utilize Oncrawl’s Inrank metric for SEO visibility, understanding its calculation, significance, and application in SEO.

Updated over a week ago

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Inrank is Oncrawl's metric that offers you a view of PageRank within your website.

It is a score on a scale of 0 to 10 that helps you understand how popular your pages are, and what the probability is that a user, navigating at random, would visit each page.

In Oncrawl, you can easily track changes in Inrank at different depths of your website, whether for all pages or for page groups.

You can also look at how Inrank flows from one page group to another, and see what happens when a group no longer influences the Inrank flow.

How is Inrank kept up to date?

Oncrawl's Inrank, like Google's PageRank, is a metric that undergoes small adjustments over time to better reflect the value of a page within the framework of a website.

In addition, Oncrawl's regular updates — based on information from Google, feedback from users like you, and results of our tests in R&D — help ensure that Inrank is as close to Google's PageRank as the current data allows us to get.

Here's a brief history of our updates:

  • 2015: Initial Inrank release

  • 2020 (March): Algorithm adjustment to base Inrank on the original PageRank algorithm

  • 2020 (October): Algorithm adjustment to adapt to current Google behavior, limiting links taken into account to <a href> links and links from a page to pages other than itself.

  • 2021 (February): Internal nofollow links leaving a page are now seen as diluters in transmitting influence from an origin page towards the targets of the link: the equity associated with this link is simply lost.

How is Inrank scored?

For each crawl, Oncrawl calculates the Inrank of each page it encounters.

Our algorithms start by looking at the internal links and calculates the probability of a page being visited.

This calculation is based closely on Google's PageRank.

Then, we apply a dampening factor and adjust the score to fit on a scale of 0-10, where at least one page is ranked 10 and at least one page is ranked 0.

Fitting the score to the 0-10 scale is done logarithmically, which means that prioritizes relative importance at each level of the scale.

Only internal "follow" links can pass popularity, or "link juice", through Inrank:

  • External links are disregarded

  • Internal "nofollow" links pass 0 Inrank

  • Pages that are redirected with a 3xx status code pass all of their Inrank to their target

  • Only <a href> links are taken into account

  • Links from a page to itself are disregarded

  • Duplicate links on the same page each convey popularity

The Inrank is evaluated for the entire known website, meaning that you should not exclude pages if you want a full and accurate picture of Inrank on your site.

When pages are missing from the analysis, the weight we give certain internal links might vary.

Crawling a limited part of your website will leave you with only partial data that can skew the results.

Why use Inrank as a main SEO metric?

Inrank is a metric which helps you understand the impact of your internal linking strategy.

The way you use internal links to structure your site has a significant impact on how Google analyzes your pages.

Google recommends using links to create an organized, hierarchical site structure as a best SEO practice: Internal linking strategies influence the importance of the page to your site as Google understands it.

This determines which parts of your site Googlebots pay more attention to, which correlates with the number of search impressions and with faster indexing.

Perhaps more importantly, Google has clearly indicated that they use the relative importance of pages on a website to rank pages on that site.

  • Google explicitly used PageRank through 2016, and allowed people to consult the PageRank of a page.

  • The absence of a toolbar displaying a webpage's PageRank score doesn't imply that it has become obsolete or no longer in use.

  • In 2017, Google’s Gary Illyes confirmed on Twitter that the algorithm still uses PageRank. Google’s John Mueller confirmed this again in 2020.

  • Google continues to confirm that they use page depth and "page importance", so we know they continue to attribute a type of PageRank score to pages.

SEO Best practices using Oncrawl Inrank

Everything is relative.

There is no bad or good Inrank to target, and because of how Inrank is normalized, you will always have pages with an Inrank of 0.

This doesn't mean they won't perform well on Google. It only means that your website's structure promotes other pages more.

Inrank should be used to understand how a particular optimization in your internal links can impact the popularity of your pages.

When you try to improve the authority of a group of pages, chances are you are lowering the authority of others.

Using Inrank, you can avoid shooting yourself in the foot.

Feed popularity to main pages

Whether you are an e-commerce vendor, a corporate entity, or an online media publisher, there are pages that are more valuable than others for your business.

As an e-commerce player, for example, your ‘money pages’ are likely your top products, your best sales, or your brand pages…

You should focus on building the highest Inrank for these pages within your site because it will tell search engines to treat them well.

In the website above, the first group is the top target page group, receiving a significant InRank flow of approximately 432.95. This is followed by the second group in the list, with an InRank flow of 8.01, the third with 5.93, the fourth with 1.86, and the fifth with 0.55.

Understand competitors' content organization

Google applies various parameters on all websites matching a query in order to rank them.

You can use Oncrawl to map the internal link architecture of your competitor and spot the Inrank patterns of their money pages.

 

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