{Weekly Discussion}: Lets talk about DA and PageRank, Spammy links vs Link Spam and Trust & Authority

I've read so many comments here which are clearly led by the "Toxic Backlinks Reports" by tools like SEMRush. Trust is binary - Google either trusts a backlink or it doesn't - there's no Toxicity score. Backlink Authority is uni-dimensional. There is no extra trust from high scores or being more relevant. Relevance from the page (not the domain) = you get more of a % of the authority; Relevance itself is not a quality indicator. There are some prevalent misunderstandings about PageRank , commonly referred to DA when expressed as a reverse engineered number. Some notes: DA is a reverse engineered number that is not accurate but - in many cases can be acurate enough to the point of determining how difficult a keyword is to rank for. # TL;DR Link Spam is a binary control: If Google thought a single link or group of links = Link Spam then you would lose all of that authority and likely be de-indexed or penalized. Its not a scale where Google "waits" until you hit x% and then get a penalty. It is immediate. In other words - if you are told you have 15% "Spammy Looking backlinks" from a search tool - and you are still ranking, then y definition, these pages <>= "Links Spam" (the Google definied penalty - Google "link spam policy guide") # What is PageRank? In brief, PageRank (named for Larry Page, Google co-founder) is essential to SEO and ranking pages. It is THE ONLY Objective standard for ranking content. Each page has a pagerank score - a 1-Dimensional number that is representative of the cumulative value of the pages linking to it (including shared/shaped authoirty from internal pages). This is applied to the page by relevance from the incoming backlinks. # Myths about PageRank * PageRank is not dead, less important and has not bee replaced by BERT or RankBrain or SpamBrain * PageRank = your pages voting power and authority * PageRank is controlled by Relevance * PageRank IS NOT A SPAM Score * If a page has PageRank, then it cannot, by definition, be spammy * Low PageRank does not indicate "low trust" * Lots of low PageRank <> indicate a spammy profile * These are myths invented cy Cemper Research Tools copied by SEMrush and others Where is DA innacurate: DA has limitations. Firstly not every page is going to be as high as the "DA" score" - some pages on a DA:80 site might be 0 Low DA is not risky. Spammy Looking links are not risky. PageRank or DA is cumulative. So 10,000 DA15 are actually better than 1 DA25 link. There is no "extra" trust in DA. # Spammy links vs Link Spam From SEMRush's toxic backlink report - peole are conflating or confusing backlink "noise" with link Spam. They are not the same thing. Spammy Looking links are an invention outside of Google. Link Spam however is a penalizable activity that if detected can result in either losing incoming authority to be blocked from ranking in Google either temporarily or permanently. Disvowing does not guarantee a return to ranking or returning authority lost. DO NOT DISAVOEW Spammy looking Links - this will not do any good. Spammy Looking Links will actually send a tiny amount of authority but do not pose risk or send "risky" PageRank signals.