In the Russian SEO market DR has become something like a currency: links are sold by it, contractors are set targets in it, and clients get reports built on it. Yet few people can explain how it is calculated, or why it falls for a site that has lost nothing. This article covers what Domain Rating shows, how the calculation works, and which decisions it can support.
What DR shows
The Ahrefs help centre defines it like this: DR shows the strength of a website's backlink profile compared with the others in the Ahrefs database, on a 100-point scale (help.ahrefs.com, checked 27 September 2026).
Two words in that definition matter. The first is "backlink". The Ahrefs blog states separately that the metric is purely link-based and takes no account of traffic, domain age or brand popularity (ahrefs.com/blog/domain-rating, checked 27 September 2026). The second is "compared". DR is relative. A score of 45 says nothing about a site in isolation; it says where the site sits among all the others.
In practice DR answers one question: how strong a domain's backlink profile looks to Ahrefs. It does not answer questions about the site's quality, its traffic, or how much the search engines trust it.
How DR is calculated
Ahrefs does not publish the exact formula, but the help article describes the principle. It rests on two rules.
- The higher the DR of a linking domain, the more weight it passes to the sites it links to.
- A domain splits its rating equally among all the domains it links to.
The second rule leads to the help article's own example: a DR 10 site linking to three domains can pass more than a DR 80 site linking to millions. The calculation is repeated iteratively across the whole graph, and the final absolute value is then scaled to a range of 0 to 100.
Several practical consequences follow from that principle.
- The unit is the referring domain. A thousand links from one site count for about as much as one.
- A donor that links to everyone passes very little. A site with outbound links to thousands of different domains divides its weight thousands of ways.
- The scale is uneven. The URL Rating help article says plainly that the scale is logarithmic and that moving from 20 to 30 is much easier than from 70 to 80. The DR article does not use the word, but DR behaves the same way: each point near the top is harder to gain.
Why DR drops while the links are still there
This is the question clients ask most. The site has lost no links, yet DR fell by two points. The Ahrefs article gives two reasons (ahrefs.com/blog/domain-rating, checked 27 September 2026).
First, other sites grow faster. Because DR is relative, your site can stand still while the rest of the database moves ahead, and the number falls without a single change to your profile.
Second, the donors themselves change. A linking site may have lost links of its own, or started linking to far more domains. Either way, the weight it passes to you shrinks.
The lesson for reporting: a movement of one to three points in a month almost never needs explaining or acting on. Look at the six-month trend and at the number of referring domains, which should not be shrinking over the same period.
DR and UR: domain and page
Ahrefs has a second, similar metric, URL Rating. According to the help centre, UR shows the strength of a single page's backlink profile on the same 100-point scale (help.ahrefs.com, checked 27 September 2026).
They differ in three places.
- Level. DR describes a domain; UR describes a specific URL.
- Internal links. UR counts both external and internal links, and respects the nofollow attribute. A page with strong internal linking on a weak domain can therefore have a decent UR.
- Correlation with rankings. In the DR help article, Ahrefs itself says that DR correlates with Google rankings pretty well, but not as well as UR.
That last point matters when sizing up competitors. When you are deciding whether a particular page can realistically be overtaken, that page's UR tells you more than the DR of the whole site. A big domain can rank with a weak article that has no links, and its high DR should not put you off.
What DR is useful for
Ahrefs itself names two uses: gauging your chances in the results by comparing your DR with the DR of the sites ranking there, and prioritising link prospects. Both work, as long as you remember the limits.
Sizing up the results. If the top results for a query are sites with DR 70 and above and yours is 15, your chances of getting there on the strength of one good article are slim. If the top includes sites with DR between 20 and 30, and pages with no external links, the query is within reach. DR works here as a quick first-pass filter when going through a keyword list; after that you look at the UR of specific pages and at what is on them. How that filter fits into a full analysis is described in our article on competitor analysis in search.
Shortlisting donors. From a long list of sites, DR helps you drop the very weak ones fast. A final decision on a donor cannot rest on the number alone; more on that below.
Tracking your own site. DR rising over six months alongside a growing number of referring domains confirms that the link work is going somewhere. As a target in its own right, DR is a worse choice than the number of good referring domains.
How DR gets misused
There are three mistakes, and all of them are common in the Russian market.
DR as a contractor KPI. Set the task as "get DR to 40" and the contractor will get DR to 40. The cheapest way to do that is links from sites that exist to sell links and look strong only in SEO tools' metrics. Search engines tend not to trust such links. Ahrefs, in its own article, also warns against chasing DR growth instead of publishing good content and earning links properly.
DR as a verdict on a donor. A DR 60 site that sells placements to anyone may have no traffic and no topical connection to your site. High DR on such sites is often artificial, pumped up by the same schemes.
DR as a search engine signal. Google does not use DR; the Ahrefs article says so directly. Yandex even less so. The metric describes the link graph as one service sees it, and nothing beyond that.
DR in Russian search
For projects aimed at Yandex, DR has one advantage and one drawback.
The advantage is that links do not depend on the search engine. If a link points at a site, it exists for Yandex and for Google alike, so the backlink profile from Ahrefs applies to a Russian project with no adjustment.
The drawback is that links carry different weight in Yandex's ranking than in Google's, and in commercial niches Yandex leans noticeably on other signals. A DR 10 site can sit at the top of Yandex for a commercial query thanks to its product range, its regional relevance and user behaviour. Judging your chances in Yandex by competitors' DR is therefore riskier than in Google.
Yandex has its own site quality index, IKS, shown in Yandex Webmaster. It is built on different principles, and comparing it with DR directly makes no sense. How the two engines differ more broadly is covered in Yandex and Google.
How to vet a donor without relying on one number
A short routine that takes five minutes per site and filters out most of the junk:
- Organic traffic as Ahrefs estimates it, and its trend over a year. A site with high DR and no traffic almost always sells links and does nothing else.
- The number of domains it links out to. If the site links to thousands of others, the weight it passes is split thousands of ways.
- Topic. A link from a site in your niche is useful even with a modest DR.
- Indexing. The page where your link will sit must be indexed by both search engines, which you can check by searching for its URL.
- The anchors of the site's own inbound links. A skew towards commercial phrases means its profile was also bought.
If there is no budget for placements at all, start with what is already in your own profile; that is covered in our article on backlink work without a budget. A general introduction to the service and its modules is in What is Ahrefs, and the related metric, Ahrefs Rank, has its own article.
DR and UR can be checked in Ahrefs Site Explorer. If you do not have a subscription, the calculator on the homepage prices access to Ahrefs.
Frequently asked questions
What counts as a good DR?
There is no absolute norm, because the metric is relative. Take your benchmark from the sites in your own search results: if competitors at the top have DR between 20 and 35, your DR of 25 is perfectly competitive.
How quickly does DR change after gaining a link?
The Ahrefs crawler has to find the link first, and then the metric is recalculated. One link from a strong site is noticeable; ten links from weak sites often do not move DR at all.
Does DR count nofollow links?
For UR, the Ahrefs help centre says explicitly that the nofollow attribute is respected. The related Ahrefs Rank is described in terms of dofollow referring domains, so it is ordinary followed links that mainly drive DR.
Does DR affect rankings in Yandex?
Not directly; it is a third-party metric. Indirectly it reflects the backlink profile, and Yandex does take links into account, although with a different weight than Google.
How does DR differ from UR?
DR describes the whole domain; UR describes a single page and includes internal links. For judging a specific competitor in the results, UR is more useful.