How To Increase DR for a Website?

"How can I raise the domain-level authority of my website?" people frequently ask me.

And I try to avoid asking this question because the score should not be your primary concern.

What you should pay attention to is what is causing the score to grow. And those are high-quality backlinks from reputable sites. So, today, we're going to speak about the three key things that can significantly boost your website's link authority. If you're unfamiliar with the term "website authority," it's a made-up statistic created by SEO tool providers.

Domain Rating, Domain Authority, Website Authority

Whether you name it Domain Rating, Domain Authority, Website Authority, or whatever you want to call it, it all serves the same goal. They strive to gauge a website's backlink profile's relative "strength" in comparison to other sites in their index. While some programs claim to be able to estimate a website's ranking potential using their website authority score, I'd take that with a grain of salt. Yes, I believe most SEOs would agree that website authority does play a role in rankings. In fact, we've discovered a direct link between Domain Rating and the number of keywords for which a website ranks.

However, correlation does not imply causality. Pages, not websites, are ranked by Google. As a result, setting a goal to enhance Domain Rating is too wide and may cause you to lose sight of your core objective, which is to rank in Google and increase organic traffic.

As a result, focusing on the website rather than the page is akin to painting your entire house merely to make your bathroom appear nice. It could work to some extent, but 90% of your efforts will have little impact on the eventual result. Now, the factors that build the authority of your website can help you rank better on Google.

And it all boils down to the primary factor in computing this measure. That's all there is to it when it comes to connections. Now, I can't comment on other tool providers because I don't know how their website authority measure is calculated.

However, I can elaborate on Ahrefs' Domain Rating website authority metric. Domain Rating is a metric that measures the overall strength of a website's backlink profile. And when I say strength, I'm not just talking about numbers. We consider the amount as well as the quality of links leading to a website. Domain Rating is no longer linear. It's scaled from 0 to 100 on a logarithmic scale. Consider it like achieving status in a video game to acquire a better understanding of this scale.

You might begin as a "Scout." It may just take a few hours to earn your Ranger badge. However, progressing to the next level may take months! Only the most talented players will be able to achieve Epic rank. Don't even begin to tell me about Legendary.

Only the "selected ones" have access to this. Similarly, improving a website's Domain Rating from 3 to 4, or even 3 to 10, is a far higher leap than moving from 3 to 4. In other words, a website with a DR 40 is not twice as authoritative as one with a DR 20. It will be much more. Although raising Domain Rating isn't the goal, let's go through the three primary factors that influence the score. The amount of unique websites that connect to you is the first.

These are referred to as Referring Domains by Ahrefs. And only followed links are taken into consideration in our calculations.

Links with nofollow, user-generated content or sponsored values will not boost a website's DR score. Since we only count referring domains and not backlinks, further connections from the same website will have no effect on a website's DR.

The Domain Ratings of the connecting domains are the second item we look at. And this is one of the ways we keep DR dependable while also making it more difficult to manipulate. For example, if a website has 1,500 followed referring domains, all of which are from DR 0 websites, those connections are unlikely to help the connected page significantly.

And we want to reflect it by not raising DR scores just on the basis of quantity. This also indicates that if the Domain Ratings of the linked websites improve, the DR of a website can improve. In 2017, for example, I constructed a connection from a DR 15 site.

The identical website now has a Domain Rating of 58. The conclusion of the tale is that you shouldn't evaluate a website just by its DR. If there are fewer authority sites, but you observe them constantly creating connections to their pages, your link's worth may improve over time. This is the Referring Domains graph for the site from which I received a link, taken on the day I received the link. The gradual growth in referring domains, as well as the individual's content, were both positive signs that the site will continue to do well.

So I put in the effort to obtain a connection from a low-DR website, and it paid off. The number of sites that the referring website connects to with at least one followed link is the third factor we consider. The less "DR equity" a site may pass, the more unique websites it connects to. For example, you may expect a boost in your Domain Rating if your new website received a link from the New York Times. After all, the New York Times is one of the most well-known websites in the world, with a Domain Rating of 94.

However, because a large number of other websites it links to with at least one followed link, it will have little effect on DR. They connect to nearly 280,000 websites with a followed link, as shown in Ahrefs' Site Explorer's Linked Domains report. So, how powerful would a link from nytimes.com be for a website? Well, it is debatable. To give you a better idea, this website has only one link, which is from The New York Times. It also has a DR score of only 2. Also, keep in mind that DR uses a logarithmic scale. So, if your site has a Domain Rating of 70, that link might not have a visible influence on your Domain Rating. Consider a site like IMDB, which has a DR of 93. They only connect out to roughly 20 domains, according to Site Explorer's Linked Domains report.

Now, we can observe that this domain has a DR score of 34 because it only has one referring domain from IMDB and no other websites. Does this imply that the DR 34 site is "authoritative" in comparison to the DR 2 site?

Or that an IMDB connection is preferable to one from the New York Times? Certainly not! And it's for this reason that I don't advocate Domain Rating scores as a stand-alone statistic. It is not a reliable indicator of the quality or validity of a website.

It's just a metric for "link popularity." Instead, combining DR with other measures such as domain-level traffic or URL rating, which evaluates the total strength of a page's backlink profile, is preferable. So, what are the main takeaways from this? I'll tell you the truth. Increase your Domain Rating but don't stress about it. Instead, concentrate on two points. Build links to the pages you want to rank first.

Google, once again, ranks pages rather than websites. You'll also need links if you want to rank your pages for popular or competitive themes. In fact, in terms of rankings, we discovered that the number of referring domains to a page is the greatest related backlink element. Rather than adding them to every page on your site, concentrate on the ones that are most important to you. #2.

Seek out links from reputable and high-quality websites. At the end of the day, you want your sites to be highly ranked on Google.

High-quality backlinks from relevant and authoritative pages are the ones that will move the needle.