Sign in
Sign up
SEO Glossary /

Domain Rating (DR)

What is Domain Rating (DR)?

Domain Rating (DR) is a proprietary SEO metric by Ahrefs. It represents the strength of the website’s backlink profile on a logarithmic scale from 0 to 100, with the latter being the strongest.

Domain Rating is widely used in the SEO community to evaluate link-building opportunities and estimate the website’s authority gained via backlinks.

Our study found a correlation between the DR of the website and the number of keywords it ranks for. This means that Domain Rating can be used to estimate a website’s ability to get organic traffic from Google.

Domain Rating correlates with the number of keyword rankings

The term logarithmic scale of DR means that the gap between DR 75 and DR 76 is much bigger than between DR 20 and DR 21. In other words, the higher the DR, the more difficult it is to increase it.

Unlike URL Rating (UR), Domain Rating is a site-wide metric (applies to the whole domain).

What influences the Domain Rating?

The exact formula of Domain Rating is not disclosed, but the following factors affect DR:

  • The number of domains linking to a website (referring domains).
  • The DR of these referring domains. The higher the DR of the referring domain, the more DR it “passes” to other websites.
  • The number of websites the referring domain links to. The more websites are linked to from the referring domain, the less DR each linked website gets.
  • Nofollow links don’t pass DR.