What Is Domain Rating?
Domain Rating is a search engine ranking score developed by Ahrefs that estimates the relative strength of a website’s backlink profile. Domain Rating scores are based on a 100-point scale.
Domain Rating (or DR) is important for search engine optimization (SEO) analysis because it closely represents the ranking potential of a website ranking in Google compared to the competitors in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
Ahrefs Domain Rating metric is calculated between websites by analyzing several factors:
- Finding all domains that have at least one followed link to the target domain.
- Looking up how many other domains each linking domain links to.
- Transferring some amount of DR link equity from each linking domain to the target domain. The amount of link equity is determined by dividing the DR of the linking domain by the number of unique domains that it links to.
However, it’s important to keep in mind that Domain Rating is not a metric that Google uses in its ranking algorithms. Google has its own proprietary PageRank and TrustRank algorithms that determine the popularity and trust of a domain using more than 200 factors. But, if you take a closer look at the highest-ranking websites in the SERPs, you’ll often see that they have a good Domain Rating score.
Therefore, you should work to increase your website’s Domain Rating metric because it can indirectly help the overall search engine visibility of your website. A good Domain Rating score is between 50 to 60 on the DR scale to compete in the SERPs for moderately competitive keywords.
Visit the SEO Glossary
Go to the SEO Glossary to find more terms and definitions that relate to the field of search engine optimization.
The Editorial Staff at SEO Chatter is a team of search engine optimization and digital marketing experts led by Stephen Hockman with more than 15 years of experience in search engine marketing. We publish guides on the fundamentals of SEO for beginner marketers.
