SheepRank: The Metric & Playbook
Authored by Eyal Krief. This is the operational core of the BlackSheep SEO Manifesto. Follow the live proof on r/SheepRank.
I. Definition: A Measure of Semantic Legitimacy
SheepRank is a score from 0 to 100 that measures a website's semantic legitimacy. It is a direct rejection of vanity metrics like Domain Authority, which measure the ghost of external popularity. SheepRank is designed to quantify what actually matters in an AI-first world: the depth, coherence, and authority of your ideas as understood by a machine.
- Entity Coverage: Depth of entities & relationships mapped vs. SERP consensus.
- Internal Authority Flow: Efficiency of internal links weighted by semantic overlap.
- Cognitive Alignment: Content structure vs. user intent & answer-engine logic.
II. The Open-Source Formula (v1.0)
SheepRank = (0.5 * Coverage) + (0.3 * Flow) + (0.2 * Cognitive)Coverage: topical completeness • Flow: semantic PageRank • Cognitive: cosine similarity with query intents.
Baseline weights come from the Dojo. They evolve via public testing on r/SheepRank.
III. The Operational Playbook
- Entity-First: Declare identity (
Person,Brand,DefinedTerm) with schema. - Answer-Driven: One page = one answer. Use FAQ/HowTo schema.
- Ground Truth Seeding: Plant structured Q&A in authentic forums (Reddit, etc.).
- Authority Echoes: Secure few high-trust citations (GitHub, DA60+ sites, transcripts).
- Probe & Adapt: Weekly test across Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude, Mistral.
IV. The Dojo: Radical Proof
The Dojo is our 90-day experiment proving SheepRank over DA. Weekly CSVs, hashes, charts & notebooks are public.