Does That DR Hold Up?

Domain Rating (DR) is a 0 to 100 score that estimates a website’s backlink strength: how many sites link to it and how strong those linking sites are. It is logarithmic, so climbing from DR 70 to 75 takes far more link equity than climbing from DR 20 to 25.

There is no universal threshold, because the answer is entirely relative to who you are competing against. A DR of 40 may be plenty in a narrow B2B niche and nowhere near enough in consumer finance. The useful exercise is not judging your number in isolation but placing it next to the sites that outrank you — our free comparison tool does exactly that.

Because DR counts links without asking who is behind them, a profile assembled cheaply can produce a respectable number. RatingDR is our own reading of the same domain: we weigh the link score against measured traffic and the quality of the linking sources, and report what that leaves. A RatingDR sitting well under the DR is the signal worth noticing — it means the headline number rests on less than it appears to.

The web checker looks up one website at a time. For side-by-side checks, use Compare with two domains. To watch many sites ongoing, add them to a free or paid tracking account and get alerts when DR or backlinks change.

In practice, yes. People say domain rank, domain rating, website authority score, or just DR for the same idea: a 0 to 100 estimate of how strong a site’s backlink profile is. This checker returns Domain Rating (DR) and, next to it, RatingDR — our own reading of how much evidence stands behind that number.

No — they are rival products. Each vendor crawls its own index of the web and applies its own maths, so the same website can score differently depending on who you ask. The results often land close together, but a wide divergence between them is not unusual and does not mean one is broken. Google uses neither: both are outside estimates of link strength, not signals the search engine reads.

Yes. Looking up the DR and RatingDR of any site is free with no signup and no daily lookup wall. Comparing two websites and viewing a public DR report are free too. Paid plans add more tracked domains, Slack & Telegram alerts, CSV export, and faster refresh.

Slowly, and mostly as a side effect of doing other things well. Links that count come from places with an actual readership — trade publications, the companies you integrate with, customers writing about their own work, and material other people have reason to reference. Bought link packages tend to raise the headline DR while leaving RatingDR flat, which is a fair summary of what they are worth. Our guide on increasing Domain Rating goes through this in order.