Find out what Domain Rating (DR) is, how it is calculated, and whether it is a reliable measure of SEO performance.

Table of contents

What is Domain Rating (DR)?

Domain Rating (DR) is a metric developed by SEO tool Ahrefs that measures the strength of a website’s backlink profile on a 0-100 scale.

Just like the Domain Authority (DA) scale used by Moz, the DR metric from Ahrefs mimics the now-defunct PageRank (PR) metric, which was previously available to the public and used to measure the ranking power of a website based on the flow of authority that came via backlinks.

How is Domain Rating (DR) Measured?

Domain Rating or DR is measured on a 0-100 scale based on the quality, quantity, and type of backlinks pointing to a website. Every backlink (dofollow) will pass a certain amount of link juice/DR juice to a website based on various factors calculated in Ahrefs’ DR algorithm.

Factors that influence Domain Rating (DR)

  • The number of links (referring domains) pointing to a website
  • The DR of referring links to a website – i.e. a website with a high number of links from websites with a high DR will “receive” a higher DR number through this positive association.
  • The number of outbound links from a referring domain – i.e. a website with a high DR that links to a lot of websites will pass less “DR juice” than a high DR website that links to fewer websites.
  • “Dofollow” and “Nofollow” status – only Dofollow backlinks pass on DR
How is Domain Rating (DR) Measured?

Is Domain Rating (DR) An SEO Ranking Factor?

No, domain rating or DR is not an SEO ranking factor. Domain Rating (DR) is simply a third-party metric that aims to mimic the functionality that was previously provided by Google’s PageRank (PR) metric.

Whilst there may often be a correlation between a high Domain Rating and strong SEO rankings, this correlation purely comes down to the fact that DR measures the strength of a backlink profile of a website.

The correlation between organic rankings and DR numbers does not indicate that Google – or any other search engine – use DR to determine website rankings.

Is Domain Rating (DR) An SEO Ranking Factor?

Are Domain Rating (DR) and Domain Authority (DA) the same thing?

Domain Rating (DR) and Domain Authority (DA) are essentially the same tool offered by two different SEO tools. Domain Rating is created by Ahrefs and offered through their SEO tool platform, whilst Domain Authority is created by Moz and is available exclusively through their SEO tool platform.

DR and DA provide a similar function to the end user – the ability to measure the backlink relevancy and strength of a website. However, it’s important to note that whilst DR and DA aim to provide the same function, the way that they both calculate numbers is different and can therefore lead to completely different numbers.

A website with a high DR is not automatically guaranteed a high DA and vice versa. We often see that some websites with a very high DR do not have a high DA. This can come down to a number of factors, including:

  • The ability of each tool to crawl and find different backlinks
  • The way that each tool ranks and determines the strength of backlinks
  • The crawl budget of each tool and how often each tool refreshes
  • How often each tool updates its ranking system to determine DA/DR
  • Whether or not a website blocks access to either tool through a robots.txt file
Factors that influence Domain Rating (DR)

Both DA and DR are third party metrics and neither one should be taken as gospel or in isolation. Both metrics can be useful for determining the backlink strength of a website and making certain decisions from this, however, it’s important to stress that neither tool is used by search engines – they simply aim to mimic the way that search engines weight backlinks.