Domain Rating, or DR, is the number most founders meet first when they start looking at backlinks and directories. It's quick to check and easy to compare, which is exactly why it's worth understanding what it measures, and what it doesn't.
What Domain Rating measures
Ahrefs describes DR as a metric that "shows the relative strength of a website's backlink profile". It's calculated across the whole site, not page by page, on a scale from 0 to 100. Ahrefs explains the method in its guide to Domain Rating, simplified to three steps:
- "We find all domains that have at least one followed link to the target domain."
- "We look up how many other domains each linking domain links to."
- Each linking domain passes on some "DR juice", roughly its own DR divided by the number of unique domains it links to.
A few practical consequences follow, all from Ahrefs' own explanation:
- Only followed links count. A site that links to you only with nofollow links won't raise your DR. See dofollow link.
- Only the first link from a domain counts. Ten links from one site count once. What moves DR is new referring domains, not more backlinks from the same ones.
- It's logarithmic. Going from DR 10 to 20 is far easier than going from 60 to 70.
- It's relative. Your DR can drop if sites that link to you start linking to many more sites, even if you lost nothing.
Is DR a Google ranking factor?
No. DR is Ahrefs' estimate, built from Ahrefs' own index of the web, and Google doesn't use it. Ahrefs itself advises against chasing the number: "Google ranks pages, not websites", so the effort should go into good content and good links to it, with DR rising "naturally as a byproduct".
DR is still useful as a quick way to compare sites: a rough gauge of how many established websites link to a domain. Moz's Domain Authority is a similar metric from another company, on a 1–100 scale and calculated differently, so the two numbers for one site won't match.
What's a good DR?
It depends entirely on what you compare with. Some numbers from our own data:
| Group | Median DR |
|---|---|
| The 243 startup, SaaS and AI directories we track (with a DR) | 49 |
| Directories that gave a dofollow link | 48 |
| Directories that gave only nofollow | 53 |
| The 16 products live in our Hangar | 27.5 |
Of those directories, 121 have a DR of 50 or more and 43 are under 20. A new product under DR 20 is completely normal: five of the sixteen in our Hangar are. We go through the full benchmarks, and what counts as good at each stage, in What is a good domain rating?
Using DR to judge a directory or a link
DR is a reasonable first filter, but a poor final answer. A higher-DR site is more established, and its links tend to carry more weight. But in our data, the nofollow directories had a higher median DR than the dofollow ones, and 17 directories with a DR of 70 or more gave only nofollow links. Before you submit or pay, also check:
- whether the link is followed (our dofollow link checker shows this on any live listing);
- whether the site is relevant to your product and has real visitors;
- whether listings are reviewed, or anything goes up.
How to check a site's DR
Ahrefs offers a free website authority checker that shows any domain's DR, and the free Ahrefs Webmaster Tools show it for sites you verify. Every directory in our directory list shows its DR, and every product in the Hangar shows its own, checked with Ahrefs.
How to raise your DR
Since DR counts followed links from new domains, weighted by their own strength, the honest way up is the same as good link building in general:
- Get listed on relevant, reviewed directories through careful directory submission.
- Publish things people want to cite: a free tool, a template, original data.
- Earn mentions from writers, podcasts and partners in your space.
Avoid anything sold as a "DR boost". Google's spam policies treat bought links, automated link building and low-quality directory links as link spam, and a number that rises through spam can't help you rank.