The RankForge Methodology
How RankForge measures structural SEO — the PageRank-style authority algorithm, the structural health score, and how we detect clusters, pillars, and orphan pages. This is the engine behind every audit.
New to the concepts themselves? Start with the Structural SEO Academy — it teaches the SEO behind every metric below.
How RankForge scores your site
How RankForge Calculates Authority Flow
A technical look at the internal authority model — the PageRank-style approach, and how we handle nofollow, link location, canonicals, and JavaScript.
How RankForge Calculates the Structural Health Score
Learn how we measure site health across six dimensions: Authority Distribution, Link Strategy, Topical Clusters, Pillar Strength, Content Coverage, and On-Page SEO.
Understanding Authority Distribution
Authority Distribution measures how efficiently internal equity flows through your link graph and reaches ranking pages.
How Topical Clusters Are Detected
We use link density and semantic analysis to identify natural content clusters and measure how well they're linked and cohesive.
Measuring Pillar Strength
Pillar pages consolidate topical authority. We measure pillar strength by analyzing how well the pillar links to supporting content and vice versa.
Content Coverage Analysis Methodology
We analyze keyword intent coverage relative to estimated search opportunity, highlighting topic gaps and new content opportunities.
Trust & operations
RankForgeBot — our crawler
The user-agent we identify with, how we respect robots.txt and rate limits, what we store and for how long, and how to opt out.
Security & Trust
The controls actually in place — encryption in transit, password hashing, access scoping, safe crawling — and how to report a vulnerability.
Learn the concepts
Want the SEO behind these metrics?
This page is how RankForge measures structural SEO. The Structural SEO Academy teaches the concepts themselves — internal linking, authority flow, orphan pages, topic clusters, anchor text — each with a free tool to act on it.
Ready to Optimize Your Structure?
Use RankForge to identify and fix structural ranking blockers.