What is Domain Rating (DR)? And how it differs from Domain Authority

My travel site, castizospain.com, has a DR of 35.

That number doesn't come from Google. Google doesn't publish anything like it. It comes from Ahrefs, an SEO company that crawls the web and keeps its own map of who links to whom.

So what is it actually measuring? And should you care?

What DR measures

Domain Rating is Ahrefs' estimate of how strong a site's backlink profile is, on a scale from 0 to 100.

Ahrefs explains the math roughly like this:

1. Look at every unique site that links to you with at least one followed link.
2. Give more weight to links from sites that have a high DR themselves.
3. Give less weight to links from sites that link out to a lot of other sites.
4. Compare the result to every other site in Ahrefs' database and put it on a 0-100 scale.

A few things fall out of that.

It counts sites, not links. Ten links from the same blog count about the same as one. A new site linking to you for the first time moves the needle more than another link from a site that already links to you.

Nofollow links don't count. If a link is marked nofollow, sponsored or ugc, it's left out of DR. I explain what those mean in Nofollow, sponsored and ugc links.

It's relative. Your DR can drop even if you didn't lose a single link, because other sites grew faster or Ahrefs changed how it crawls.

Why DR moves so slowly

The scale is logarithmic. In plain words: each point is harder to earn than the last.

Going from DR 5 to DR 15 might take a handful of decent links. Going from DR 55 to DR 65 takes a lot more. That's why big sites barely move and small sites can jump after a single good link.

There's also a delay. Ahrefs has to find the page that links to you, crawl it, and recalculate. A link you earned this week might not show up in your DR for a few weeks.

So if your DR sat flat for a month, that's normal. Not a sign that anything's broken.

DR vs Domain Authority (DA)

People mix these up all the time, so here's the short version.

• Domain Rating (DR) is made by Ahrefs.
• Domain Authority (DA) is made by Moz.
• Authority score is the name several other tools use for their own version.

They all try to answer the same question: how strong are this site's links? But each company crawls the web differently and uses its own formula. A site can be DR 40 and DA 25. Neither is wrong. They're just different rulers.

The useful habit is to pick one and stick with it. Comparing a DR from one tool to a DA from another tells you nothing.

Does DR affect your Google rankings?

Not directly. Google doesn't use DR, DA or any third-party score.

What Google does use is links, along with a lot of other things. And DR is built from links. So when you earn good links, your rankings and your DR tend to go up together. That's why DR is worth watching: it's a simple, public sign that your link building is working.

Where people go wrong is chasing the number for its own sake. Buying links from high DR sites with no real readers can push DR up while doing nothing for your traffic. If you've been offered "high DR" links, read What is a PBN? first.

What to watch alongside DR

DR tells you how strong your links are. It doesn't tell you whether they helped.

For that, watch the pages you built links to. Open Google Search Console, go to Performance, filter by that page, and look at its average position and clicks over the last few months. If the page is climbing, the links are doing their job, whatever your DR says.

How DR Buddy uses it

DR Buddy checks your DR once a day and draws it on a chart, so you can see the slow climb instead of guessing. It marks a milestone every 5 points and keeps flat weeks calm, because they're normal.

If you want to check any site's DR, you can look it up free on the homepage. No account needed.