#95 – Tim Soulo From Ahrefs Spills the Beans on Their New DR Update

What you will learn

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How domain rating is calculated
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Why you have probably been using DR the wrong way
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Why you should not use DR in isolation
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What metrics are best to use alongside DR
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Tim Soulo’s number 1 tip to get more search traffic with Ahrefs

In this week’s episode, Gael and I are joined by Tim Soulo to discuss the recent changes to the DR (Domain Rating) metric on Ahrefs.

Tim is the Head of Marketing and Product Strategy at Ahrefs. So, who better to discuss the recent changes and help you understand what you should actually be using DR for?
What is DR (Domain Rating)?
Domain Rating is a site-wide metric.

It gives you an idea of how strong the backlink profile of a site is by looking at links from domain to domain.

Tim wrote an article on the Ahrefs blog that explains everything in detail. However, as a quick overview:

We recommend as, in our opinion,on the market. You can try it out for 7 days for just $7. It’s well worth it.

* DR only takes into account one link from each domain
* It only considers dofollow links
* It takes into account the DR of the site linking to your site

Tim suggests that you think of it like page rank on a domain level. The calculation is a little bit more complicated than outlined here but you can sum it up as the link popularity of your site or a combination of the number and quality of the sites linking to your domain.


Mark's Note
While far from perfect, DR is probably the best metric to gain a quick “bird’s eye” view of the relative authority of a site. If you need to make decisions about the quality of large numbers of sites, for example when prospecting for links, then DR is your best bet. But if you can spend more time looking at each site, then there are several other factors which becomes equally, if not more important.
Why Did You Feel The Need To Change The Domain Rating?
Ahrefs we receiving a lot of feedback within their Facebook group and a number of support requests.

They were finding that a new site could build a few links and pretty soon it was sitting with a DR of 30. This was unrepresentative of reality. In fact, most sites were clustered in the 30-50 range which simply isn’t the case.

Ahrefs wanted to redefine the scale so that new sites had a lower DR and the scale reflected the real world a lot better.
How Was The New DR Calculated?
This is where it becomes important to be clear with the language that we use.

The underlying numbers behind DR have not changed. Each site is given a figure for their ‘domain strength’ so to put it. This is the same number that determines the Ahrefs rank.


Mark's Note
Ahrefs Rank is this raw number ordered from highest to lowest. Ahrefs rank doesn’t show the relative distance between each number. DR is simply Ahrefs Rank plotted on a scale of 0-100. This is a logarithmic scale. The change in this update is actually only to this scale. The ordering (Ahrefs rank) remains constant. It’s just the scale that has changed.

For the first update that the community didn’t really take to, Ahrefs tried a little too hard to represent the real world. It was set up based on the biggest sites - Google, Facebook, Twitter, BBC and then compared sites to them.

BBC - Domain Rating of a small site
This left almost all sites that weren’t extremely large in the 0-10 range.

While this may be reflective of reality,