Domain Rating (DR) is a ranking metric developed by Ahrefs that shows the strength of a website’s backlink profile on a scale of 1 to 100. Domain Authority (DA), on the other hand, is a metric developed by Moz that is a predictor of how well websites will rank on search engines.
Just to be clear, Domain Rating has no direct effect on a page’s ranking on Google. High DR websites tend to rank highly on SERPs only because they also score well on Google’s ranking algorithms (it’s correlation, not causation). However, DR is still a useful measure of gauging a website’s link popularity and its ability to get traffic from Google searches.
Ahrefs calculates the DR of a website in a number of ways. These include the number of unique domains having at least 1 do follow the link to the target website, the DR values of those linking domains, whether or not the link does follow or nofollow, and the number of unique domains each of those websites links to.
Domain Authority (DA)
Domain Authority (DA) is a search engine ranking metric developed by Moz that predicts how well a website will rank on search engine result pages (SERPs). Domain Authority scores range from 1 to 100, with higher scores corresponding to a greater ability to rank. Moz arrives at a DA score using multiple factors, such as the linking root domains, the number and quality of incoming and outgoing links, and your domain age – along with a number of other factors.
Because Domain Authority is just meant to give you an idea of a site’s ranking ability, having a very high DA score shouldn’t be your only goal. You should use DA only as a predictor of your rankings on SERPs. For example, if you’re a gym owner and want to want to rank your website higher than your competitors, you’d be smart to look at the DA scores for your competitor’s site and aim to have a higher score than them. But that’s about the extent to which you should “obsess” over DA. Remember, ranking on top of SERPs is about more than just Domain Authority.
In A Nutshell
– Domain Rating (DR) gives you an idea of the strength of a site’s backlink profile, while Domain Authority (DA) gives you an idea of which site will rank higher on SERPs.
– The main factor in measuring Ahrefs DR is backlinks. However, Moz scores DA using factors such as the linking root domains, the number and quality of incoming and outgoing links, domain age, and more.
How does Link Building HQ use DR and DA?
Here at Link Building HQ, we use both Domain Rating (DR) and Domain Authority (DA) to gauge a target website’s strength before finalizing where we’re going to place your backlink. But we go beyond just DR and DA by also reviewing the ranking difficulty of market verticals to determine our link pricing structure. Not only does our pricing take into account the overall “authority” of the blog in question, but it also assesses the level of competition in that particular industry as well.
