Domain Rating

Domain Rating explained

Domain Rating, or DR, is Ahrefs' score for the strength of a website's backlink profile, on a scale from 0 to 100. It looks at how many unique sites link to a domain and how strong those linking sites are themselves. Like Moz's Domain Authority, it's a third-party metric. Google doesn't use it.

How it affects trust

DR is useful for rough comparisons, for example to see whether a competitor has a much bigger link profile. It's misleading when used as a target or a price tag. The scale is logarithmic, so going from 10 to 20 is far easier than from 60 to 70, and the score can be inflated by low-quality links that do nothing for real rankings.

Risky habits

• Reporting DR growth as if it were business growth.
• Paying for links priced by DR.
• Ignoring relevance. A DR 30 local link can matter more than a DR 80 unrelated one.
• Using DR to judge whether a page deserves to rank. Rankings are decided page by page, query by query.

A realistic example

An IT support company notices that a rival with a higher DR ranks above it for "IT support Cardiff". Looking closer, the rival's top links come from Cardiff business groups and a local university partnership. The lesson isn't to raise a score. It's to build similar genuine local relationships.

How to review yours

Ahrefs provides a free checker for a site's DR and a sample of its links. Use it to understand where competitors' links come from, then ask whether you could earn similar ones honestly. Search Console remains the free, Google-sourced view of your own links, even though it doesn't give a score.

Related link terms

• Domain authority: A third-party score that estimates a site's ranking strength. It isn't a Google metric.
• Backlink: A link from another website to yours; a classic off-page signal.
• Anchor text mix: The mix of branded, naked and keyword anchors in a link profile.