What Is Domain Rating And Is It Important?
Jessica Millican May 15, 2024
What is Domain rating? (DR), not to be confused with Domain authority (DA), is an SEO metric created by Ahrefs to showcase a website’s backlink profile on a logarithmic scale from 0 to 100, with the latter being the best. A new website will start at 0 and have to work its way up.
Domain rating has no direct impact on a page’s ranking on Google; it is more of a third-party tool for you to reflect on and see where you can make progress. There is, however, a correlation between better rankings on search engine results pages (SERP), as higher DR tends to be favoured by Google. This, however, is correlation and not causation.
We at Red Cow Media utilise DR’s metric through link-building opportunities and access the website authority gained and shared through higher authority via backlinks.
What is Domain Rating Influencing Factors?
Ahref’s exact algorithm is not something well known but it can be calculated in several ways to bring DR to your website. These are some of the key factors that can influence your DR if done correctly:
- The more referring domains there are, the better.
- The DR of all the referring domains means the higher, the better, as it will share some of the rewards with you.
- The number of websites the referring domains link to. For example, if you are linked to a domain that is linked to 100+ others, you will get a smaller slice of their DR.
- As the DR of a website that links to you increases over time, your DR will also increase.
- If the link is a follow or no follow, unfortunately, no follow doesn’t pass on DR but that doesn’t mean these aren’t still important.
It’s important to note that Ahref’s domain rating is mostly, if not completely, down to links to referring domains and things that may be seen as important for domain authority or page authority aren’t regarded or calculated on the logarithmic scale.
Some black hat SEOs thought, what is domain rating weak points? To cut corners and get quick and high results for their website’s DR, it is through a tactic called backlink spamming, which is essentially any links placed on a site regardless of the context or user experience. For example, you could have a link to a construction site on a fashion blog. Although they experienced a quick reward, Ahref’s has been able to identify these blackhat practices, and those websites may have experienced a huge drop in their domain rating.
When it comes to cutting corners for quick wins in SEO Manchester, there will always be consequences in the long run; therefore, we at Red Cow Media only follow best practices to ensure our clients are organically increasing and will reap the benefits as time moves forward.
Why is Domain Rating Important?
It’s easy to ask what is domain rating is, but understanding if and why it is important for your website is another thing. Here are some of the reasons why social media agencies in Manchester deem DR important:
Although that domain rating correlates to strong search traffic, we wouldn’t purely focus on improving your DR; it would be more of a contributing factor and result from all of our efforts. Therefore, it’s important to have a high rating; you should spend all your time building it.
As Google ranks specific pages, for example, if you are looking for a social media marketing agency in Manchester, our page would rank well for it rather than our homepage URL. We would therefore focus on specific and well-performing service pages to create these backlinks to referring domains while also producing quality content that contributes to the user experience.
Both your DR and your search traffic will grow organically as a byproduct. Domain rating can be an important metric that can actually assist with link-building strategies and improve the overall SERP’s results.
How To Improve Your Domain Rating Score?
As mentioned above, we have answered what is domain rating is and how Ahref’s domain rating calculator isn’t a solution or answer to improving your search engine rankings; it does, however, contribute to it alongside many other things. Here are a few strategies we would implement to improve your domain rating score.
- Create High-Quality Content
Creating optimised and unique high-quality content is key to securing high authority backlinks from relevant sites.
- Link Building Strategies
Approaching only relevant industry-related sites offering collaborations or guest post opportunities could help earn quality backlinks.
- Check Your Current Backlinks
Having broken backlinks can impact your overall performance. This signals to Google that the site needs to be updated. Therefore, regularly monitoring your backlinks can prevent this.
- Update and Revise Your Website
Checking your website regularly can help fix and spot any issues and consistently improve the user experience.
- Monitor These Things
These steps and contributing factors need to be monitored regularly to ensure our strategies work cohesively and to avoid any changes that might affect the quality of our SEO.
Summary
Overall, the question of what is domain rating and why is it important is simply put, DR is a crucial metric to SEO; it should be improved along with many other things and isn’t the main and sole focus when it comes to improving rankings and user experience.
