Domain Rating (DR) / Domain Authority (DA)

Domain Rating (DR) and Domain Authority (DA) are third-party scores that rate the strength of a domain's backlink profile on a scale from 0 to 100. DR comes from Ahrefs, DA from Moz, and both are built on the number and the quality of the domains linking to a site. The scale is logarithmic, so the step from 70 to 80 takes far more work than the step from 20 to 30.

Both metrics imitate the logic of Google's PageRank, where a link works as a recommendation. Neither is a Google number, and Google uses neither DR nor DA in its rankings. They also miss much of what Google's systems actually weigh, semantic relevance between the linking page and the target above all, and a score can be inflated with link spam that Google sees through without difficulty. That makes them a bearing rather than a target in themselves.

As a quick screen they are hard to do without in practical SEO work. They allow a domain to be compared with its competitors, publishers and partners to be sorted by how interesting they are for link work, and a backlink profile to be tracked over time. In a professional link analysis, DR usually appears as one filter among several, next to traffic, topical relevance and the link's placement on the page. Reading a score like that next to the numbers that matter more is the subject of the guide to link analysis.