Search engines keep their exact ranking formulas locked away, so the SEO world has spent years building its own measuring sticks — third-party scores that estimate how much authority a site has earned. Domain Authority is the most famous of them. But there's an older, quieter one that still matters: MozRank.
If you've ever seen a number labeled "mR" next to a backlink report and wondered what it meant, this is the guide. Let's unpack what MozRank measures, how it's different from the scores you already know, and how to check yours.
MozRank is a link-popularity score developed by Moz (formerly SEOmoz) that rates the importance of a web page on a scale of 0 to 10. It was designed as a rough analogue to Google's original PageRank: the more high-quality pages that link to you, the higher your MozRank climbs.
The key word is page. MozRank scores individual pages, not entire domains. Your homepage might have a MozRank of 6 while a deep blog post on the same site sits at 3 — because links point to specific pages, and MozRank reflects that reality.
The scale is logarithmic, like the Richter scale for earthquakes. Moving from 3 to 4 is relatively easy; moving from 8 to 9 takes an enormous amount of link authority. Each step up demands exponentially more link power than the last, which is why the very top of the scale is reserved for a tiny handful of the web's most-linked pages.
This is where most people get confused, so let's clear it up:
Think of it this way: MozRank is the raw ingredient (link popularity), while Page Authority and Domain Authority are the finished recipes (ranking predictions that include links plus other signals). They're related — a page with high MozRank usually has strong Page Authority — but they're answering different questions.
Moz doesn't publish the exact formula, but the inputs are well understood: the number of linking pages, the quality of those pages (a link from a high-MozRank page passes far more value than one from an obscure page), link dilution (a page linking to a hundred sites passes less value to each than one linking to three), and relevance and trust (links from spammy or unrelated neighborhoods contribute little).
In practice, ten links from respected, relevant pages beat a thousand links from random directories, blog comments, and link farms. MozRank was built to reflect that.
Honest question: in an era of Domain Authority and dozens of competing metrics, why care about a 0–10 score from an older system?
It isolates link power. DA and PA blend many signals together. MozRank tells you specifically how your link profile is doing — no noise. When your rankings drop and you want to know whether links are the problem, that's a useful distinction.
It's great for comparing pages. If a competitor's product page has a MozRank of 6 and yours has a 3, you know exactly where you stand on links — and roughly how much link building it will take to close the gap.
It complements backlink analysis. MozRank works best alongside a look at who's actually linking to you. Our guide on how to check your backlinks and competitors walks through the practical side — finding your linkers and turning that intelligence into an outreach list.
Checking is the easy part:
One reading in isolation doesn't tell you much. A 4 means nothing until you know your competitors are at 5 or 6 — or at 2.
Context is everything, but here are rough benchmarks:
Don't chase a number for its own sake. A MozRank of 4 that outranks every competitor at 3 is a winning score. The goal is to beat the pages you're actually competing against.
There's no shortcut — MozRank rises when your page earns better links. The playbook is the same one behind every successful link-building campaign:
Create link-worthy content. Original research, useful tools, and definitive guides earn links because they're worth referencing.
Fix broken link opportunities. Sites in your niche link to resources that no longer exist. Find those dead links, create something better, and let the site owner know.
Do targeted outreach. When you publish something genuinely useful, tell the writers who cover your topic — personal, not spam.
Reclaim unlinked mentions. People mention your brand without linking more often than you'd think. A polite ask converts many into links.
Prune toxic links. Disavow spammy links you didn't earn — they drag down the quality signals MozRank cares about.
Be patient. Links accumulate over months, not days. MozRank is slow-moving by design, and rushing it usually means tactics that backfire.
MozRank is a focused, page-level measure of link popularity — the raw link power behind a page, stripped of other ranking signals. It's logarithmic, quality-weighted, and best used as a benchmarking tool: check your key pages, check your competitors, and let the gap tell you how much link building lies ahead.
Used alongside Domain Authority and Page Authority, it gives you a complete picture of where your link profile stands — and what it'll take to move it. For the domain-level side of the story, see our guide on what domain authority is and how to increase it.
Check your page's score now with our free MozRank checker — then compare it against your top competitors.
It depends on your niche. For most small-to-medium sites, a MozRank of 3–4 on key pages is respectable, and 5–6 is strong. What matters most is how you compare to the specific pages you're competing against in search results — beating them is the real goal, not hitting an absolute number.
No, but they're conceptually similar. Google's original PageRank was Google's own internal link-popularity measure (the public toolbar version was discontinued years ago). MozRank is Moz's independent attempt to model the same idea on a 0–10 logarithmic scale.
No. Google doesn't use any third-party metric in its ranking algorithm — MozRank, Domain Authority, and Page Authority are all external estimates built by SEO companies. They're useful for analysis and benchmarking, but they don't directly influence where you rank.
MozRank moves slowly because it's based on link data that Moz recrawls and reprocesses on its own schedule. Check monthly rather than daily — trends over several months tell you far more than any single reading.
Not legitimately. MozRank reflects real link popularity, which builds over time as pages earn editorial links. Tactics that promise fast gains — buying links, link farms, automated spam — tend to produce low-quality links that MozRank weights poorly, and they risk search engine penalties on top.
