Domain Rating, also known as DR, is a rating metric that shows how powerful a website’s backlink profile is. This is important not only for your own website but also for overall SEO as this can influence your website’s rankings in the search engines. We’ll help you sort out what DR is and why it matters to your ranking strategy.
What is Domain Rating?
The first thing we need you to understand is that this isn’t an official Google rating system. It’s actually a system developed by Ahrefs, an authority in SEO and ranking in general. While the DR system isn’t used specifically by Google, it has been shown that most high DR sites do rank well because they have a strong backlink profile.
DR is calculated by considering all the do-follow links that are pointing to a website and how much link juice they pass on. Getting multiple links from the same website won’t increase the DR as it’s on a domain basis. That means it doesn’t matter if you have one or 100 links from the same website, it will only be counted once towards your DR score.
So to recap, this is a rating that determines the strength of a website’s link profile. Only do-follow links are considered in the DR score, and it’s based on the number of domains linking to a website rather than the overall number of links. That means it’s more important to get more domains to link to a website rather than getting hundreds of links from the same website.
Why Does DR Matter?
DR matters both for your website and for your linking strategy. While this isn’t an official Google metric, it goes without saying that a website with better links will usually rank higher. We found that while it’s not a perfect correlation, websites with higher DR scores will almost always rank higher for keywords. That means that having a higher DR score should be one of your goals.
DR also matters when finding domains for backlinking. A higher DR page will pass on more overall link juice than one with a lower DR score. Please notice that we used the word “overall” as this will become important soon. In general, DR also ranks the power that page can pass on. This means that a link from a website with a DR rating of 85 will pass on more power than one with a DR rating of 15.
Strategic Linking
Here’s where it gets a little complicated and why you need a professional digital marketer to help with your linking. Remember how we said that a high DR website has more overall power? Here’s where it becomes important.
While a high DR page is stronger, the link juice it passes on through do-follow links is split evenly between all its links. That’s great if there are only a few outgoing links because you’ll get a huge boost. But what if they link out to thousands of websites? Sometimes a domain with low DR and only a few links can be the better choice for your backlinking efforts.
Conclusion
Your Domain Rating is very important for your overall rankings and linking strategy. Our professional service can help ensure that you get the best links while also enhancing your DR score. Contact us today and we can help you get the best links to raise your DR and your search rankings.