How is "Priority" defined in the SEO inbound links report?

[Anonymous]

The high priority and low priority in my report make no sense.

[Josh_Hill13]

Can you be more specific about what makes  no sense?

[Anonymous]

Sure.  🙂

We have a link from a press release, which is given High priority, even though that is not likely to contribute to improved Google rank.  

We also have a link from a feature article we wrote for a well-regarded trade publication, which is something that is likely to contribute to improved Google rank, but it is given Very Low priority.

[Josh_Hill13]

The docs don't seem to explain the algorithm for deciding if an inbound link opportunity is a high rank or low rank.
https://community.marketo.com/MarketoArticle?id=kA050000000LIkYCAW

I suspect it is based on the inbound domain's authority and pagerank.

[Josh_Hill13]

Jennifer,

How do you know those links are good or bad? Are you using Moz or another tool to compare?

I agree that a PR link may not be as valuable anymore, but something is telling Marketo that it still matters because it is a news item. The trade pub you have may not have a high page rank or authority to Google, but it might send your site a lot of visitors. Marketo can't inherently know that though.

Maybe Marketo can shed some light on its system and if it is using Moz or another engine.

[Anonymous]

All the changes in Google over the last few years (Penguin, Panda, Hummingbird) emphasize content and authority, so the trade publication is defnitely a better link.  It's not about Moz rank - the highest ranking pages on Moz are irrelevant to my target audience. 

I would think the priority should take into account follow vs. no follow links, authority, and content type. It should also see which links are more correlated with our list of keywords.

[Anonymous]

Thanks, Josh - I appreciate your input on this!