What Is Domain Rating? Is a High-DR Link Worth Buying?
Domain Rating (DR) is Ahrefs' 0 to 100 score for the strength of a website's backlinks, and Ahrefs itself says there is no evidence that search engines use it as a ranking factor. In Ahrefs' own example, a link from a DR 26 site that links to five sites lifts your DR more than a link from a DR 73 site that links to 5,000, so the number on a link offer tells you less than it seems.
- 01Domain Rating (DR) is Ahrefs' 0 to 100 score for the strength of a website's backlinks compared with every other site in Ahrefs' database. Ahrefs calls it "a proprietary SEO metric" and says "There's no evidence that search engines use Domain Rating" as a ranking factor.
- 02Ahrefs splits each site's rating equally across every site it links to, and only the first link from each site counts, so a hundred links from one site count the same as one.
- 03Google's spam policies, last updated 28 August 2026, list "Buying or selling links for ranking purposes" as link spam unless the link is labelled as paid or nofollow in the page's code, and Ahrefs says a link labelled that way adds nothing to DR.
- 04DR can fall while you lose no links, because other sites gaining links push everyone else down Ahrefs' scale. Ahrefs says a DR is good "if it's higher than or comparable to similar sites", so compare yours with the businesses already on page one for your searches.
Domain Rating (DR) is a score from 0 to 100 that the SEO tool Ahrefs gives a website for the strength of the links pointing at it, compared with every other site in Ahrefs' database. A link from a high-DR site can be worth less than its number suggests, because Ahrefs splits each site's rating across every site it links to, and Ahrefs itself says there is no evidence that search engines use DR as a ranking factor. Buying a high-DR link to lift your Google rankings breaks Google's spam policies unless the link is labelled as paid, and Ahrefs says a link labelled that way adds nothing to DR. We read Ahrefs' help pages, its write-up on how DR is calculated and Google's spam policies on 3 October 2026.
Some Singapore SEO packages sell links by the number. When we read the published packages of seven Singapore agencies on 26 September 2026 for our guide to SEO pricing in Singapore, two listed a set number of backlinks each month: one gave 50 at every tier, and the other gave 2, 5 or 10 "High DA" backlinks depending on the tier. DA is Domain Authority, a 1 to 100 score from the SEO tool Moz, which Moz says "is not a Google ranking factor". We have not seen the links in either package, so we cannot say what they are worth, and the DA or DR printed on an offer cannot tell you either.
Our first client, Lullaflex, started at DR 0 with no backlinks. Within two months of us building its site, ChatGPT named it as the "Best for Singapore" pick when someone asked for the best cooling mattress for hot weather. The case study on how our first client got cited by ChatGPT has the details, including one result that did not hold up when we tested it again.
How does Ahrefs calculate Domain Rating?
Ahrefs' CMO, Tim Soulo, sets out the calculation in a 2022 write-up on Domain Rating. Ahrefs finds every domain with at least one followed link to your site, meaning an ordinary link the other site has not labelled nofollow, and looks up how many other domains each of those sites links to. It then passes you some "DR juice" from each one, an amount worked out "(roughly) by dividing the DR of the linking domain by the number of unique domains that it links to". The Ahrefs help page on DR puts the same rule in one line: "The source domain splits its rating equally amongst the domains it links to."
Applied to Ahrefs' example, that rough rule gives the numbers below. They are an illustration only. Ahrefs calls the rule "a severely oversimplified explanation", and the real calculation is repeated across every domain before the results are scaled onto the 0 to 100 range.
| Site linking to you | Sites it links to | Rough share passed to each site it links to |
|---|---|---|
| DR 26 | 5 | 26 ÷ 5 = 5.2 |
| DR 73 | 5,000 | 73 ÷ 5,000 = about 0.015 |
The same write-up answers a reader who got a link from techcrunch.com, which Ahrefs then rated DR 93, and saw their own DR stay where it was. TechCrunch linked out to "nearly 100K+ other websites" at the time, Ahrefs explains, so the amount it passed to any one of them was "relatively low".
Ahrefs lists a few more rules that matter when someone is putting a price on a link:
- Only the first link from a domain raises your DR, so a hundred links from one site count the same as one.
- Links labelled nofollow or sponsored in the page's code add nothing to DR.
- A link on a homepage and a link on an inner page count the same for DR.
- DR is "purely link-based". Ahrefs leaves out a site's search traffic, the age of its domain and how well known its brand is.
- In its write-up, last updated in October 2024, Ahrefs said DR "doesn't account for backlink SPAM", and that large amounts of low-quality backlinks "may actually increase your DR".
Does Google use Domain Rating?
Ahrefs itself says "There's no evidence that search engines use Domain Rating" as a ranking factor (Ahrefs Help). Its glossary calls DR "a proprietary SEO metric by Ahrefs", calculated from the links in Ahrefs' own database. Google's John Mueller wrote in February 2020 that "We don't use domain authority at all in our algorithms", as Search Engine Roundtable reported. In October 2024 he told a Reddit user worried about a falling Moz score that "Many SEO tools have their own metrics that are tempting to optimize for (because you see a number), but ultimately, there's no shortcut" (Search Engine Roundtable).
Both answers were about Moz's Domain Authority or tool scores in general, and we did not find a Google statement that names Ahrefs' DR. Ahrefs' own Website Authority Checker page says "Google representatives consistently deny the use of 'domain authority' as a ranking factor", and adds that Mueller has described some of Google's own site-level metrics as similar. His words, as Search Engine Journal quotes them, were that "some of those site-wide level metrics might kind of map into similar things".
Links still count in Google, through Google's own calculations. On the same day in February 2020, Mueller confirmed "Yes, we do use PageRank internally, among many, many other signals." Ahrefs reports that DR and keyword rankings "correlate well" across 218,713 domains, and its page adds: "This is a correlation study. It does not prove causation." Ahrefs also notes that Google ranks individual pages, and tells site owners to earn links to the pages they want to rank.
Is a high-DR backlink worth buying?
A high-DR link is not worth buying to lift your Google rankings. Google's spam policies list "Buying or selling links for ranking purposes" as link spam unless the link is labelled as paid in the page's code, with rel="sponsored" or rel="nofollow", and Ahrefs says links labelled that way "won't improve DR". Ahrefs does say that, as a general rule, links from high-DR sites "carry more 'weight'", and its help page also says you should "never judge the quality of a website on site-wide 'authority' alone".
Google's spam policies, last updated on 28 August 2026, define link spam as "creating links to or from a site primarily for the purpose of manipulating search rankings". Google accepts paid links for advertising and sponsorship when they carry a rel="nofollow" or rel="sponsored" attribute, and says sites that break its policies "may rank lower in results or not appear in results at all". The same list includes "Exchanging goods or services for links" and "Sending someone a product in exchange for them writing about it and including a link", so a free meal or product given to a blogger for a linked review needs the same paid label.
If a seller says a paid link will raise your DR, ask how the link will be marked. A nofollow link adds nothing to DR, and a followed link sold to lift your rankings is the kind of link Google's policy calls spam. A paid placement on a site your customers read can still earn its price as advertising, judged by the visitors and enquiries it sends, provided the link is marked.
The DR of the site on offer can itself be inflated. Ahrefs says some rule-breaking SEOs "found ways to inflate Ahrefs' DR with link spam and exploited that loophole to make a profit", and that it has since identified many of those methods.
What should I check before getting a link from a site?
Most of these checks come from Ahrefs' own list of questions to ask about a site before getting a link from it. The marking question comes from Google's policy.
| Check | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Whether the site gets search traffic of its own | A link sends you visitors only if people read the page it sits on. Ahrefs asks "Does it get any organic traffic?" |
| Whether it covers your industry or your customers | Its readers are the people who might click through and enquire. Ahrefs asks whether the site is "topically-relevant to yours" |
| How the link will be marked | If you pay for it, Google allows it only when it is labelled sponsored or nofollow, and Ahrefs says a labelled link adds nothing to DR |
| Whether it will still be there next year | A link lasts only as long as the page it sits on. Ahrefs asks whether the site is "likely to still be around in six months? A year? Five years?" |
If the links come bundled in a monthly SEO package, ask for the list of sites before you sign, and ask the marking question for each one. Our guide to choosing an AI SEO agency in Singapore covers the other warning signs in a proposal. Earning ordinary links carries no documented penalty for a new site, as we found when we checked whether backlinks can hurt a new website.
Why did my Domain Rating drop when I lost no links?
Ahrefs' help page says the most likely reason is that other websites gained a lot of backlinks: "when a DR100 website gets more backlinks, we can't make it DR101. Instead, other websites are pushed down the scale." Ahrefs describes DR as relative, so your score can fall while your own links stay exactly as they were.
Ahrefs' page on DR drops and its write-up give three more reasons that involve no lost link:
- A site that links to you lost DR itself, so it has less to pass on.
- A site that links to you started linking to many more sites, so your share of its rating got smaller.
- A link you still have was switched to nofollow, and Ahrefs ignores nofollow links for DR.
Ahrefs' remaining reason is a lost high-quality followed link, which is worth ruling out before you blame the scale. Its help page suggests opening the Referring Domains report and checking which domains with followed links you lost around the date of the drop. If you do not pay for Ahrefs, the free Ahrefs Webmaster Tools shows who links to a site once you verify you own it, and the Links report in Google Search Console lists the sites that link to you most, from a sample of Google's own data. Ahrefs also changes the calculation itself. Stan Ventures, an SEO agency, reported on 17 October 2025 that Ahrefs confirmed a new DR and UR algorithm rolled out on 26 September 2025, after which many sites' DR moved overnight. Moz says the same kind of movement happens to Domain Authority, which can change with "changes in competitors' scores, or updates to the DA calculation model".
If nothing you value is missing, the drop happened inside Ahrefs' scale. Whether your pages are doing better or worse in Google is a separate question, and Google Search Console answers it with Google's own data. Our guide to SEO results in Singapore covers what to check there, stage by stage.
What is a good Domain Rating for a small business?
There is no fixed number. Ahrefs says "It's not possible to say that a Domain Rating of 30 is good, or 50, or 60, or 70", and gives a rule of thumb instead: your DR is good "if it's higher than or comparable to similar sites". The scale is logarithmic, so the gap between DR 70 and DR 71 is much bigger than the gap between DR 20 and DR 21.
For a Singapore business, the similar sites that count are the ones already on page one for the searches you want. Search your main customer query on Google, note the businesses that rank, and check each one in Ahrefs' free Website Authority Checker, which shows the DR of any domain. Ahrefs' write-up says that if your DR is roughly the same as a competitor's, there is "a good chance" you can rank for the keywords that competitor ranks for, and it calls a DR 20 site going after a DR 80 site's keywords "rather unreasonable". Choosing the searches a site at your DR can win is what keyword research is for. Our first client shows what that looks like at DR 0. Within two months of us building its site, one of its pages was on page one of Google for "can a super single fit an HDB common room with a wardrobe", next to furniture retailers that have been around for years.
If an agency reports a rising DR as its main result, ask what changed in Search Console as well. Our guide to what an SEO report should show you each month lists the rest.
Frequently asked questions
What is Domain Rating in SEO?
Domain Rating (DR) is Ahrefs' 0 to 100 score for the strength of a website's backlink profile compared with the other websites in Ahrefs' database. Ahrefs calculates it from links alone and says it does not factor in search traffic, domain age or brand popularity.
How do I check my Domain Rating?
Enter your domain in Ahrefs' free Website Authority Checker, which shows the DR of any website. Check the businesses on page one for your main searches the same way, because Ahrefs says a DR is good when it is higher than or comparable to similar sites.
How do I increase my Domain Rating?
Ahrefs says getting backlinks from more unique websites is "the only way" to raise DR, and that raising it "should never be your primary goal". It advises earning links from strong pages on reputable sites in your industry to the pages you want to rank, and says your DR and search traffic "will grow naturally as a byproduct".
Is Domain Rating the same as Domain Authority?
They are separate scores from separate companies. Domain Rating comes from Ahrefs and Domain Authority (DA) comes from Moz. Moz says DA runs from 1 to 100 and draws on linking root domains, the quality of those links and "other signals that correlate with rankings", while Ahrefs says DR is purely link-based. Moz also says DA "is not a Google ranking factor".
Can a website with a low DR get cited by ChatGPT?
Yes. Our first client's site started at DR 0 with no backlinks, and ChatGPT was recommending it by name within two months of us building it. Google's AI Overview was harder to win: in a clean, logged-out session, it cited established furniture sites on all eight bed-size questions we tested and never cited our client.
We post findings like this on LinkedIn.