Introducing the NEW Ahrefs’ Domain Rating (and how to use it)
Domain Rating (or DR) is one of the most prominent metrics in Ahrefs that you can see in nearly every report we have.
A lot of our customers track fluctuations of their websites’ DR almost religiously and quite often get very nervous if it drops by a few points.
Well, next week we’re going to roll out a new and improved formula of how we calculate Domain Rating.
As a result, the vast majority of sites that currently have DR 30–50 will drop to nothing (because, in fact, they don’t deserve to have the “medium†DR that they currently have).
And since this change will affect almost every website in our database (some more, others less), domain rating ahrefs we decided to let everyone know about it upfront to prevent any panic. #ahrecalypse
Other than that, this is a perfect chance to further educate you about this metric and help you integrate it deeper into your marketing workflows.
And, before we start, there’s one quick (and somewhat silly) thing that I need to clarify:
The sudden drop in DR that is about to happen has 0 connection with how your website ranks in Google. We’re just changing the way we calculate this metric. There’s nothing to worry about.
And now onto the Q&A:
What is Domain Rating (DR)?
Domain Rating is a proprietary Ahrefs’ metric that shows the strength of a target website’s total backlink profile (in terms of its size and quality).
DR is measured on a logarithmic scale from 0 to 100, with the latter being the strongest.
SIDENOTE. “logarithmic scale†means that the gap between DR 77–78 is much bigger than the one between DR 27–28. In other words, the higher your DR gets, the more challenging it will be to grow it by another few points.