Although many companies now use social media to reach their customers, there’s still a tremendous benefit to having a website that is fully optimized and set up to perform well in search results. One of the first things new customers do when they need something is to search for it online and visit a few websites to see which ones offer what they need. Part of having a good website is its value to customers and its presence online. Your site’s Domain Rating (DR) is an integral part of your presence, but what is DR in SEO and what can it do for you?
A website’s Domain rating measures the strength of the site’s backlinks compared to other websites in the Ahrefs database. It’s a useful tool that analyzes data to compare hundreds of thousands of sites. The DR is rated from one to 100, the higher the number, the stronger your score. There are ways to improve your DR score and make it more valuable to search engines and customers.
Ahrefs calculations are considerable, but in essence they look at the backlinks on a website by using bots in a similar way to Google. It looks at how many do-follow links have been sent by the website to other domains.
Domain ratings look at what they call “link juice” which is the strength of the links. If your site backlinks to strong authoritative sites, then this has more link juice than if they were weaker websites. It also looks favorably on sites that link to a few good domains instead of ones that link to thousands of poorer domains.
Having a high DR score is helpful for those that want to see where their site ranks among others. It’s also a good way to see if you are moving the site in the right direction. However, Google doesn’t take DR scores into account when crawling websites, so it doesn’t automatically mean you will rank higher in Google search.
However, because DR measures the strength of backlinks just like Google does, it can be a good indication of how Google will rate your site.
Along with a high DR, you also want to ensure that you are doing other things to improve your website’s overall ranking. One way is to make sure that your metadata has all the details about the web pages and blog posts so that visitors can see what your site is about. The metadata is what people who search for something will see in the results.
The speed that your site pages load are another important factor. You can find tools that will assess the speed of your site and show you where you can optimize to make it faster. Slow sites are often ranked lower because it doesn’t offer a good user experience.
Optimizing your site to look good on mobile devices is a must for modern websites. Google actively encourages this and will rank sites higher if they have a good mobile version.
There are many ways that you can improve your website to offer a better experience to your customers. DR is only one of these tools that you can use, but it’s a valuable way of checking that your website is offering value and will be looked at favorably by search engines such as Google.
"Just recently, I was able to take a pretty competitive keyword from #12 (page 2), up to #5 on page 1 in 14 or 15 days."
