Ahrefs KD how reliable is it?

[bopeep]

I was doing some keyword research on Google, and I have the surfer plugin installed, and it showed over half a million visit on a random review website that was in a niche I wouldn't never have researched. Totally unrelated to what i was looking for.

So I typed it on ahrefs and what did I find?
It ranked for over 60,000 keywords that have a KD of less than 5... 80% less than KD 2...
I clicked a few SERP and the SERP was full of ebay and yelp type result, bit of course I can't reseach 60,000 keywords.

So how reliable has the KD been for you.

Any tips for filtering the keywords to a manageable number on Google Sheets or Numbers?

 

[secretagentdad]

It’s a bad joke.

I dunno why they don’t fix it.

They totally have the resources to.

I used to sell difficulty scores that used their data on term explorer.

We only ever made backlink shitter cuz they wouldn’t let us be affiliates.

Making a passable organic difficulty score that doesn’t put long tails above the stem keywords is brain dead easy.

You can do a pretty great job with just document volume metrics like “keyword” or all in title and adding a comparative scale of your choice.

 

[Ryuzaki]

It's hit or miss. I find that most of the time it's fairly accurate. Sometimes it's wildly inaccurate, but not frequently enough that I quit using it.

The way I see it is that KD and any other metric is a shortcut. It's a way to pre-filter and get actionable data on tons of research without me having to do it manually. Let's say it's 90% accurate (not counting the suggestion on how many backlinks you need to rank, which is goofy and should be ignored entirely, in my opinion).

If I use their data, order 100 articles, and 90 of those ended up being a success, while 10 were duds due to a hole in their scoring algorithm, that's still 90 posts written and published on 90 keywords that are in the range I desired. The other 10 may come to fruition as they age and my site becomes stronger. It's still an investment that has net benefits in many ways.

If I was trying to do the research by hand, I wouldn't even have started ordering content yet, and probably not for months still.

Yeah, I have qualms with it, but at the end of the day it's a tool that helps me move a lot faster. Not even Google can get a 100% success rate in what they measure and score.

 

[LinkPlate]

Ahrefs Index is massive so their data should be accurate most of the time. I don't think you need to, but you can use another tool with Ahrefs to compare backlinks and average the data out as well.

 

[tyealia]

Keyword difficulty in ahrefs is a barometer of LINK DIFFICULTY. Do not take it as anything other than that. If you want to see how difficulty in terms of linking a keyword is it's great. If you want to see actually difficulty for a niche to rank in that's another 50-75% of the puzzle.

Take a look at #1 the user intent for the keyword, is it commerce or aff sites ranking at the top #2 take a look at what dr the competitors have, does your site have a high enough dr to compete? Are you going to try to compete with dr 80 sites with your new dr 1 niche blog? That's an easy loss. Also, take a look at the pages ranking, are they related do they have the keyword in their title and url. I could go on, theres alot of factors but KD is great for the backlink side and nothing else.

 

[DanielS]

What if the keyword difficulty were to be kept extremely low? Meaning, would a keyword with a keyword difficulty of 1 not be easy, regardless of the fact that difficulties are calculated with backlinks as the focus?

 

[Ryuzaki]

What if the keyword difficulty were to be kept extremely low? Meaning, would a keyword with a keyword difficulty of 1 not be easy, regardless of the fact that difficulties are calculated with backlinks as the focus?

It depends. I don't think Ahrefs weights the domains that pages exist on highly enough in the KD calculation (if they do at all... surely they do). It seems to overweigh the amount of backlinks going to the ranking pages themselves. You could have the top 10 be full of pages with zero backlinks, but they're all on DR 60 to DR 70 domains. And the KD is 1, when clearly it's a bit tougher than that.

I say to use it as a shortcut and then "manually" check the SERPs (which can be done with one button click in Ahrefs), or conversely, if you're moving at scale, just roll with it and save the time. Publishing a decent post on what may "really" be a KD 40 keyword when you meant to go for KD 1 isn't a complete loss. Not at all. When you move at scale, you win some and lose some, but you're playing a numbers game so it's to be expected.

 

[Charles Floate]

I've spoken to Tim Soulo before, they only weight the backlinks of the pages in the SERP. So not even root authority is counted, which is why the metric is wildly thrown off.

If you have a proper authority site in a niche (e.g. DR90 for cars, maybe 60 for knitting) then you can basically use DR to pick and choose how many backlinks a page will need to rank for a keyword.

Anything else and it's pretty meaningless... It's rated a lot of keywords KD0 that may have 0 links to the pages but you're going to compete vs Wikipedia, eBay and Amazon for top 3.