The world of SEO and PR can be complex and confusing for businesses, especially when it comes to figuring out the health of your site and how that might be impacting its performance.
While no single tool provides a comprehensive analysis or solution, DA (Domain Authority) and DR (Domain Rating) are valuable for offering a quick overview of your site’s overall condition, its industry performance, and how it stacks up against competitors.
These metrics, created by top SEO platforms, help businesses evaluate their online presence and pinpoint areas for improvement. By assessing elements such as backlink quality, site structure, and content relevance, DA and DR offer a useful benchmark for measuring success. However, it’s important to remember that these scores are just part of a much bigger puzzle.
In this article, we’ll explain what these metrics actually mean and explore how a well-executed digital PR strategy can boost your website’s authority and improve its chances of ranking highly on search engines.
What’s in this article:
- What is Domain Rating (DR)?
- Domain Rating (DR) vs Domain Authority (DA)
- How to boost domain rating through digital PR
- Bad practices for boosting your domain rating
- Key takeaways
What is Domain Rating (DR)?
Domain Rating, or DR, is a third-party metric created by Ahrefs that measures a website’s backlink profile. It’s a measurement used by PR and SEO professionals to track the overall success of a site’s performance.
Domain Rating is calculated on a scale from 0 to 100, with a higher number indicating greater authority.
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DR uses ranking factors to determine the strength of a backlink profile and the website’s likelihood of ranking well in search engine pages. These include:
- The number of backlinks going to the website
- The quality of the backlinks
- The age of the domain
- The linking domains
Some of these factors can be affected and improved by successful digital PR campaigns.
Strategic digital PR campaigns can significantly enhance a website’s backlink profile by building high quality links. Securing backlinks from reputable, high-DR news sites, blogs, and other online sources can strengthen a site’s authority and improve its performance.
Equally important is diversifying the range of backlinks a website acquires. While having a large number of backlinks from a limited set of domains might boost numbers, expanding to include links from a broader variety of domains can greatly enhance the health and credibility of the backlink profile.
A high DR signals to search engines like Google that a website is strong and trustworthy. Sites with higher DR scores are more likely to rank well, making them more accessible to both new and existing customers. High ranking websites benefit from greater online visibility, increased organic traffic, and the customer engagement that follows.
Domain Rating (DR) vs Domain Authority (DA)
Domain Rating (DR) and Domain Authority (DA) are two different metrics used to evaluate a website’s authority. They also act as indicators for a website’s authority and potential to rank in search results.
The two metrics can be measured in Moz and Ahrefs - any good PR agency will track these for you and keep a regular eye on the activity impacting your site’s ratings.
Domain Authority:
- A comparative metric calculated by Moz.
- Scored from 0 to 100 - the higher the number, the more likely that website is to rank in search engines.
- DA measures a website’s authority relative to other domains in its niche.
- The measurement for each website is based on a website’s backlinks, including the number of them, their quality and the number of unique referring domains.
- Not a direct ranking factor used by Google, but domain authority does reflect factors that Google takes into account.
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Domain rating:
- A metric calculated by Ahrefs on a scale from 0 to 100.
- Higher scores indicate a stronger backlink profile and greater authority.
- The score is calculated using factors such as the number of links to the site, the quality of those links, the age of the domain and the linking domains
- A key indicator to measure a website’s potential for high rankings in search engines.
- A high DR can help a website increase visibility on search engines, attract links from other authoritative sites and boost chances of a high SERPs ranking.
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How to boost domain rating through Digital PR
Our work with Online Bedrooms is a great example of using Digital PR strategically to help boost domain authority and achieve a higher DR.
E-commerce site Online-Bedrooms.co.uk approached us for support with Digital PR and tasked us with winning them links to support their SEO strategy - to boost Domain Rating and search engine visibility.
We created a targeted campaign, aimed to position Online Bedrooms as experts in bedroom furniture and furnishing, interiors and home.
Through a mixture of expert comments, press releases and reach outs, we were able to achieve success.
At the end of the initial 12 month campaign period, the Online Bedrooms domain rating had doubled from 12 to 25, with the number of backlinks rising to 1.3k and referring domains increasing from 303 to 620.
The combination of these metrics considerably improved the health of the site - which boosted organic traffic and experienced a growth in orders.
When pitching press releases to the press, we make sure to always target and report on those links from high authority domains. Gaining coverage for releases from low authority websites provides far less value.
Bad practices for boosting your domain rating
Ill-informed businesses may resort to questionable tactics to artificially boost their domain rating. However, these practices often backfire, leading to penalties from Google and other search engines.
Any reputable PR agency will steer you far away from taking part in any of these link building schemes. Instead, they focus on ethical, long term strategies to secure high-quality backlinks. Partnering with a dedicated PR agency to build links consistently over time is the most effective way to enhance your site’s domain rating and authority while maintaining compliance with search engine guidelines.
Bad link-building practices include:
Pitching to spam sites
There are some domains which will copy and paste anything pitched to them and upload onto their site. This creates a website with thousands of pages of low quality, irrelevant content, with no particular niche or specialism. Gaining backlinks from these sites could negatively impact your link profile and actually reduce your domain rating.
Link buying schemes
Buying links, using automated link-creating tools or exchanging links can decrease your domain authority and work against you.
Building links to random pages
This won’t help to build a healthy backlink profile. Focus on relevancy and quality when pitching press releases to earn links.
Key takeaways
- DR is a metric that measures a website’s backlink profile. It is a measurement used by PR and SEO professionals to track the success of a site’s performance.
- Good digital PR practices can help boost a website’s domain rating - while bad practices could decrease the number as search engines would view the site as unreliable or spammy.
- Domain Rating (DR) and Domain Authority (DA) are two different metrics used to evaluate a website’s authority. They also act as indicators for a website’s authority and potential to rank in search results.
If you’d like more information on how we can help boost your website’s domain rating, please get in touch.
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