Why Domain Rating is Important for Link Building

You have finished building your website. The design is impeccable, and the content is informative and lengthy. Now it’s time to send Google “recommendation letters” from the sources it already knows and trusts. These “letters” are backlinks that lead from reputable and valuable websites to your content. They signal to Google or any other search engine that your business is active and trustworthy.  

However, not each website can convince Google into ranking your content higher on search results. The guarantor should have a spotless reputation. How to check it? Thus we come to the term Domain Rating. Let’s have a closer look at it.

What is Domain Rating?

The Domain Rating or simply DR is a score that measures the quality of a website’s backlink profile. The DR ranges from 1 to 100, with 100 being the highest value. It tells you whether or not a website is worth your marketing outreach.

A high DR rating on a website is essential for obtaining efficient backlinks, therefore understanding other sites’ DRs will assist you in making better judgments. If you have backlinks from authoritative domains, your DR will increase as well.

Getting backlinks from a website with a low DR, on the other hand, will be a waste of time. It is also a good idea to monitor your website’s DR over time to see if your strategy is working or not.

The amount of DR is determined by the DR tool you’re using. Although the most famous and free-to-use DR checker program is the Ahrefs website authority checker. They, like Google, employ web crawlers to gather referring domain data, however, they do so in a different manner.

A domain checker tool will examine the number of distinct domains that have linked to your site and their DR and backlink profiles.

They then do more computations and coding to generate raw DR scores. The final domain rating is derived by scaling those values.

As a consequence, since backlinks from more authoritative websites have more weight than links from websites with less authority, DR technology will prefer authoritative websites.

However, having many links from a single authoritative source will not significantly boost your DR. One website’s links are considered as one “vote” by DR tools.

Because metrics like link popularity and trust flow are inherently subjective, their values change from time to time. For example, if competing sites acquire a lot of high-quality backlinks, your website’s DR will decrease. As a result, a site’s DR might plummet without losing backlinks.

DR checker applications sometimes modify the way they calculate DR, which may result in lower or higher DR for some websites.

The difference between Domain Rating and Domain Authority

The Domain Authority and Domain Rating are important SEO metrics. I hope now you have a solid grasp of what the Domain Rating is, so let’s dive into the term of Domain Authority.

The Domain Authority or just DA predicts the probability of a website showing in search engine result pages. They range from one to 100, with higher values indicating greater ranking potential.

The Domain Rating was created by Ahrefs, while the Domain Authority (DA) was coined by Moz. According to Ahrefs, the Domain Rating is essentially a website’s authority score. But it’s still different from Moz’s Domain Authority.

The metric that Ahref’s DR focuses on is a domain’s strength, examining the domain’s unique backlinks. It does not consider things such as the age of the domain or its traffic.

On the other hand, Moz DA focuses on a website’s probability of ranking. It’s more of a comparing tool than an assessment one. In actuality, Moz utilizes data from their Link Explorer online index to evaluate DA.

When you use the Ahrefs checker to determine your domain’s rating, you’re basically getting a snapshot of your website’s backlink profile. You’ll see things such as how many linking sites there are, how many backlinks there are, and whether they’re do-follow links. On the other hand, when you use Moz Checker to check the authority of your domain, you’ll see metrics such as linking roots, spam score, and ranking keyword rankings. As a result, domain authority incorporates more variables than domain rating.

If your site has a high DA, it’s likely to have a high DR score as well. It is nevertheless feasible for a website to rank on SERPs without having many backlinks. In such a scenario, a site may have high DA but low Domain Rating.

Takeaway

To make the most out of your backlinks, you can benefit from knowing the Domain Rating. When you consider guest posting or placing your backlinks on other websites, it makes a lot of sense to check their DR score using Ahref or any other backlink authority checker.

Remember, links from high-quality, relevant websites are the best kind of backlinks you can get. They will help your website and its ranking in Google. 

Seems overwhelming? No worries – our backlink packages are designed to suit any website’s needs. Our competent team of SEO experts can help guide the process of link building so that you focus on the business itself.