What is a domain rating

Any SEO specialist understands the importance of a website’s link profile for its success. By analyzing the “fatness” of the link mass, you can understand whether a competitor’s resource is well filled with links and how hard you need to work to surpass it. One of the key services for assessing your link profile is Ahrefs. In order to analyze the quality and authority of a web resource, metrics such as Ahrefs Domain Rating (DR) and Moz Domain Authority (DA) are used.

What is Domain Rating (DR)

Domain Rating (or DR) is a metric that reflects the overall strength of a specific resource’s link profile. It should be noted that there is no connection between DR and site ranking. Although, quite often sites with a high DR score occupy higher positions in search results. But it can also be the other way around.

On the site Ahrefs says: “…Ahrefs Domain Rank is NOT a measure of your ‘site authority’ and is not calculated based on your search traffic or ranking… Domain Rank is a metric that shows the ‘link popularity’ of your website compared to all other sites in the world on a scale from 0 to 100.”

Domain Rating (DR) evaluates only the number and quality of external links to the platform, without taking into account the age of the domain, traffic, etc. At the beginning of 2018, Ahrefs changed the algorithm for distributing resources on a logarithmic scale, and most of the domains in the rating shifted from the DR 20-50 range to DR from 0 to 30. The difference in the Domain Rating values ​​of resources with a strong and authoritative link profile from weak and young ones has increased, and for example, getting a DR-30 rating is more difficult for a “young” site. Now you need two or three dozen external links to get DR-30+, these are the indicators now for sites with the number of links from 150 to 300. Do not forget that at the top of this ranking are Facebook, Google and similar popular resources. It is not at all necessary to strive for a Domain Rating of 80; it is quite enough to match the indicators of competitors’ sites and exceed them.

How to check Domain Rating?

To measure the indicator, you need to go to the website Ahrefs and enter the resource address or domain in the search bar. As a result, you will see a detailed table with the DR rating.

In addition, the number of links leading to your site, as well as the number of backlinks, is displayed. The higher the DR indicator, the more reliable and authoritative your resource is. For example, for popular and well-known platforms it is around 100; ordinary local platforms have a DR from 1 to 10.

How to improve website DR?

You need to understand that only the quality and quantity of external backlinks to the site are taken into account without domain age, link spam, traffic volume and other parameters. To raise DR:

1. Create useful and high-quality content, which other resources will want to link to.
2. Attract more Follow links to your site. But do not forget that links from platforms that have low DR are useless, as well as from resources that link to a large number of other projects.
3. Attract links from authoritative and relevant sites. It’s good if you can get links from sites with similar topics and a good reputation.
4. Set up internal linking to increase the authority of key site pages.

What is Moz Domain Authority (DA)

Moz Domain Authority (DA) is the method by which Moz tells us how well a property should rank. The authority level of a web resource in Google is assessed on a scale from 0 to 100. Unlike DR, the higher the site’s DA, the greater the likelihood of its high ranking.

How to check Moz Domain Authority?

To measure you need to go to the website Moz and enter the domain of a specific resource in the search bar.

As a result, you will see, in addition to domain authority, a spam score and ranking keywords.

How to improve website DA?

An increase in this indicator reflects an improvement in your resource and an increasing likelihood of reaching the TOP. To raise DA:

1. Eliminate low-quality links forever.
2. Create high-quality and valuable content, post videos, create podcasts. Carry out the necessary work so that people want to visit your site and want to link to it.
3. Attract good links from reputable sites.
4. Work on internal linking to improve page relevance and indexing.
5. Work on technical parameters (robots.txt, sitemap.xml, etc.) to help crawlers conduct indexing.

To summarize

By analyzing your website and the link profile indicators of top competitors in your niche, you can understand whether your web resource needs improvements. Assessing the link mass of competitors with the best DR values, the number of external links, the quality and age of donor domains, types of sites will help with choosing the right strategy external website promotion. When publishing backlinks to your resource, be sure to evaluate external link donors:

• Ahrefs Domain Rating and Moz Domain Authority (DA);
• domain age;
• subject of the resource;
• domain region;
• attendance;
• quality of content and design.

Selecting donors with appropriate quality indicators, including (DR), for new links will improve metric values ​​and site authority.

Oleksandr Romanenko

Team Lead/Senior SEO specialist

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