Domain Rating

Domain Rating (DR) is a term used by SEO professionals to “score” a domain. It was coined and used by ahrefs, an SEO tool, which allows you to track, measure and objectively compare different domains in terms of their current search performance.

In SEO, there tend to be two factors people talk about: DR – domain rating (this Ahrefs figure) – and DA – Domain Authority (the Moz system of establishing a domain’s authority).

How DR is Calculated

The below description comes directly from Ahrefs on the subject of Domain Rating.

  1. Look at how many unique domains have at least 1 dofollow link to the target website;

  2. Take into account the DR values of those linking domains;

  3. Take into account how many unique domains each of those websites link to;

  4. Apply some math and coding magic to calculate “raw” DR scores;

  5. Plot these scores on a 0–100 scale (which is dynamic in nature and will “stretch” over time).

How to improve your Domain Rating

There are a few ways to improve your DR:

  • Get more links from other websites pointing in to the target domain (aka “get more Backlinks“);
  • Get more higher DR domains to link in (kind of the same thing, but this is important!)
  • Make sure there are more unique domains linking to the target domain – i.e. not all from the same site(s)
  • Try to get links from websites which do not link to many websites (yeah, not easy, we know !!)

Its not all about scores

Neither DR nor DA are not the be-all-and-end-all in terms of a domain, or a website, nor does it mean “this will rank well” but its proved to be a good general indicator of the health of a domain in terms of how well it might rank in search engines.

If you’re looking here, you may well be interested in more of our SEO Tutorials.

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