Domain Rating, or DR, is a metric created by Ahrefs. The company describes it as showing the relative strength of a website's backlink profile, on a logarithmic scale from 0 to 100. It is purely link-based, so it ignores traffic, domain age and content quality. Ahrefs itself says there is no evidence search engines use it, which makes DR a tool for comparing link profiles and not a ranking signal.
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How Ahrefs calculates it
Ahrefs says DR works somewhat like PageRank, except between websites instead of pages. It finds domains with at least one followed link to the target, considers how many other domains each of them links to, and passes on a share of each linking domain's rating. A link from a site that links out to very many domains passes less.
- Nofollow links do not count toward DR
- Only the first followed link from a given domain adds to it
- Ahrefs says the score does not filter out backlink spam
- Scores are relative, so DR can drop even if you lost no backlinks
Google does not use it
DR belongs to Ahrefs, and Google does not use it to rank pages. Ahrefs' help center states that there is no evidence search engines use Domain Rating, and it quotes Google's John Mueller saying Google does not have anything like a website authority score. Ahrefs also reminds readers that Google ranks pages, not websites.
Google's own ranking guide says its systems work at the page level while also using some site-wide signals and classifiers, and it says good site-wide signals do not mean all of a site's content will rank highly. Those internal signals are not DR, and nothing outside Google can read them.
How to use it sensibly
Use DR for rough comparison: sizing up competitors in the same tool, screening a long list of outreach prospects, or spotting a large imbalance in link strength. Ahrefs itself warns against judging a site on authority alone. Then look at the links themselves, the pages that rank and whether the site is relevant to your audience.
Example
A prospect list that needed a second look
Hypothetical onboarding tool Harrowfield filtered link prospects by DR and got a tidy list. A manual review showed that several high-scoring sites published posts on every subject and appeared to have little real readership, while a lower-rated product management newsletter reached exactly its buyers.
The team pursued the newsletter and dropped the others, keeping DR as a first filter and leaving the final decision to a reviewer.
Common mistakes
Treating DR as a KPI
A rising score may not bring more traffic or signups. Measure the business results that the links were meant to support.
Buying links to raise the number
DR does not filter out spam, so the score can be inflated. Google's spam policies treat buying links for ranking purposes as link spam.
Comparing DR with other vendors' scores
DR, Moz's Domain Authority and Semrush's Authority Score use different models and data. Their numbers are not interchangeable.
Frequently Asked Questions
No. It is an Ahrefs metric, and Ahrefs itself says there is no evidence search engines use it. It can correlate with rankings without causing them.
Possible causes include lost links, linking sites losing DR or linking out to more domains, and changes across the wider Ahrefs index. A drop can happen without any change to your own backlinks.
It depends on your competitors. Compare with the sites you actually meet in search results, using the same tool, instead of aiming for a universal number.
Keep reading
- Domain Authority: Domain Authority is a third-party score, created by Moz, that estimates how likely a site is to rank based on its links. Google does not use it.
- Authority Score: Authority Score is a Semrush metric from 1 to 100 that grades a site or page using link, traffic and spam signals. Google does not use it.
- PageRank: PageRank is Google's original algorithm for scoring pages by the links pointing to them. It still exists in some form, but scores have not been public since 2016.
- Referring Domains: Referring domains are the number of unique websites that link to your site, counting each linking domain once no matter how many links it sends.
- Backlink: A backlink is a link from another website to a page on yours. Search engines use backlinks to find pages and as one signal of which pages are worth ranking.
- Blogger Outreach: Blogger outreach is contacting writers, editors and site owners to tell them about a resource, story or expert that could be useful to their readers.
- Citation Building: Citation building means listing a business in directories and data sources. Useful for local and niche visibility; poor directories add nothing.
- Co-Marketing Links: Co-marketing links come from joint campaigns with partner companies, such as shared reports, webinars and guides that both sides publish.
