Ahrefs DR (Domain Rating) Manipulation, Usage and Calculation Explained

Domain Rating is a measure of a site’s backlink profile.

Site owners and SEOs use DR to check the strength of their and competitors’ backlinks. 

DR is also extensively used by site owners when selling their sites, SEOs when pitching their services to clients, and freelancers when providing backlinking services.

So, let’s dive into what this Domain Rating metric is from Ahrefs.

What Exactly Is Ahrefs Domain Rating?

Ahrefs Domain Rating (DR) is an SEO metric measuring the strength of a website’s backlink profile. 

In Ahrefs own words – 

“Domain Rating (DR) is an Ahrefs metric that shows the relative strength of a website’s backlink profile. DR is measured on a logarithmic scale from 0 to 100, with the latter being the strongest.”

The higher the DR, the higher the site’s backlink strength.

DR on a logarithmic scale means increasing DR gets more challenging as you move to a higher DR score. For example, increasing DR from DR1 to DR3 is far easier than improving from DR71 to DR73.

Tim Soulo, CMO of Ahrefs, during his talk at the New York SEO meetup on April 19th, 2024, highlighted some stats:

Only ~0.007% of all domains in the Ahrefs database have a DR of 80+, which is 15,000 domains out of the total 207.4 million unique domains that Ahrefs knows. That’s how difficult it is to achieve high DRs.

To put some estimated numbers into this scale, there are probably 100 million domains with DR between 0 and 10. And only a few thousand in a range of 90 – 100.

You can check Ahrefs DR for free from here.

All you need to do is enter the website name.

You will get the Ahrefs Domain Rating, the number of backlinks, and referring domains.

How Is It Calculated?

Ahrefs highlights that its DR calculation is similar to Google’s PageRank. 

While the exact calculation is not public, here is the simplified version of the factors used to calculate DR for a site:

1. Quantity of backlinks (only do-follow links). The more, the better.
2. DR of the linking websites. The higher the linking domain’s DR, the better it is.
3. The number of domains each linking domain links out to. The fewer the links out to other domains, the more “link juice” your site gets.

Link juice matters here. It is the value or authority the referring domain passes on to your site with its link.

For example, a DR 20 site linking to only ten domains will pass on more link juice than a DR 80 site linking to millions of domains.

In short, Ahrefs finds the domains that link to your site, checks their DR, and counts the number of other domains they link to. Then, it calculates the link juice each linking domain gives to your site and sums it up. You now get a raw DR score. From there, your DR is determined on a relative scale.

The relative scale here means that your site’s DR also depends on other sites’ DRs. Even if your site’s backlink profile has remained the same but other sites have improved their backlink profile – your Ahrefs DR can go down.

Ahrefs DR Can Be Easily Manipulated

Unfortunately, high Ahrefs Domain Rating doesn’t mean much. A site with a high DR does not guarantee high traffic. We will show you this example at the end of this section.

You can often find correlations between sites with high DR and high traffic. But, DR, at its core, is a vanity metric. 

Plus, Ahrefs DR can be manipulated easily. 

There is an industry of freelancers ready to inflate your site’s DR.

We tested by paying these “DR hackers” from Fiverr to jack up Ahrefs DR for five new domains. The study is explained in detail here.

The simplified version is:

• We registered five domains. Naming courtesy – ChatGPT.
• We hired five Fiverr contractors – the “DR hackers” to increase the Ahrefs DR for our new domains. We paid them from $15 to $85 – $275 for five contractors.
• We waited for two months.

And lo and behold, here are the results:

Yup. On average, it took $50 to get an Ahrefs Domain Rating of 50, and for one domain, it was just $15.

As discussed earlier, a site with a high DR does not necessarily mean high traffic. Here is the promised example.

We paid $35 to inflate this site’s DR (AuthorityCheckLab.com). The table above shows that the site gained an Ahrefs DR of 51 on 26 December 2023.

It has gained an even higher DR of 60 as of 25 March 2024.

But the site doesn’t rank at all, and there is no traffic. The Ahrefs traffic checker also shows zero traffic.

That’s how easy it is to manipulate Ahrefs DRs and how nonsense this metric can be. Learn more about True Domain Authority.

Wrapping Up

Ahrefs Domain Rating has its uses. It can help compare sites and backlink profiles, assuming their DRs weren’t manipulated. For high-quality websites and portfolio sites, checking DR makes sense. You can also track how your backlink profile is improving. However, Ahrefs DR as a standalone metric doesn’t mean anything. Always check rankings and traffic in addition to DR.
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