Domain Rating
Also called: DR, Ahrefs DR
Domain Rating (DR) is Ahrefs' 0-100 score that measures the relative strength of a website's backlink profile compared with other sites in Ahrefs' index. A higher DR means more and stronger referring domains. It is Ahrefs' own metric, not a Google ranking factor.
How Ahrefs calculates DR
Ahrefs computes DR in a way loosely modeled on PageRank, but between whole websites rather than individual pages. It finds every domain with at least one followed link to your site, then passes each linking domain a share of “DR juice” based on that domain’s own DR divided across the number of unique domains it links out to. Those values are scaled onto a 0-100 range that behaves logarithmically, so climbing from DR 20 to 30 is far easier than 70 to 80.
One practical consequence: a link from a focused, high-authority site can move the needle more than one buried on a page that links to everything. As Ahrefs puts it, “a DR-10 domain which links to three other domains can influence your DR more than a DR-80 domain which links to a million other domains.”
What DR does not tell you is just as important: it ignores traffic, content quality, topical relevance, and whether you will actually rank. Ahrefs is blunt that “DR is not a Google ranking factor” and reports only about a 0.131 correlation between DR and rankings. There is also no universal “good” number. As their data piece frames it, “good is whatever beats the people you’re actually competing with,” so a DR that dominates one niche is average in another.
How it affects your traffic
DR is the scoreboard most outreach targets glance at before deciding whether to link to you, so a low score quietly costs you placements and the referral traffic that comes with them. Because DR is driven by followed links from unique referring domains, the way to raise it is earning links from focused, authoritative sites, not buying volume from spammy ones. A clean, rising DR also makes future outreach easier, since editors and other link prospects treat it as a quick trust check. Our link building work targets exactly that: fewer, cleaner referring domains that lift both your DR and the rankings it loosely tracks.
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