Ranking your website or pages on Google can be a daunting task. It brings the need for evaluating your site’s progress through a website analysis tool. Here comes Domain Authority (DA) and Domain Rating (DR) – two key metrics used for successful link building campaigns.
These can help identify the right websites to target your link building outreach efforts. Both technically tell a website’s strength and are determined by backlinks that direct to your site. Google consider websites with high DA and DR score more authoritative, making them rank higher in search results.
In this post, you will learn:
- What are domain rating and domain authority metrics?
- Comparison between DA and DR
- How to increase DA and DR scores?
- And a lot more
What is Domain Authority (DA)?
Domain Authority (DA) is a website ranking prediction metric developed by Moz that evaluates the ranking of a website in search engines. The higher the DA score, the more chances of your website ranking in search engines.
When measuring the score, the Moz algorithm considers both your total number of linking root domains and the quality of these links. Quality backlinks are those that are valuable, relevant, and appear naturally in the content.
This metric indicates the relevance of a website for a particular topic, industry, or niche and how likely it is to rank in search results, and how many backlinks it has.
What is Domain Rating (DR)?
Domain Rating (DR) is a website backlink profile analyzing metric developed by Ahrefs that identifies the quality of a website backlink. The higher the DR score, the more it indicates a website with a high-quality backlink profile – based on quality and the total number of links it includes.
Using the DR metric for link building is an excellent way to determine the number of links directed to your website and what you should target more in the upcoming campaign.
Difference Between DR and DA
Domain Authority and Domain Rating are almost similar. However, they still have many significant differences that you should know. While they both are essential metrics to analyze a website’s SEO, here are some differences between the two:
- Moz introduced DA while Ahrefs developed DR. According to Ahrefs, the DR of a website show its authority, but it is slightly different from Moz DA.
- The backlink profile measures a site’s DR. It doesn’t consider factors like the age of the domain, spam links on the site, and website traffic.
- Several factors come into play when it comes to the DA of a website. A site’s ranking pages decide the domain authority of a website.
- When you analyze the DA of a website, you will obtain data metrics like linking root domains, spam score, ranking keywords, domain authority, and top-ranking keywords.
- When you analyze the DR of a website, you will obtain data metrics like DR, the total number of backlinks, and the total number of linking websites.
How to Increase the DA Score of a Website?
Moz measures the website’s DA score on a logarithmic scale. In order to increase a website’s DA score, focus on these points:
- DA is determined by the domain age of a website. An old, authoritative website will have a better DA in the eyes of search engines.
- The quality of a backlink is another important aspect of a better DA score. Additionally, having one backlink from a single website is more beneficial than using multiple backlinks from the same website.
- Focus on mobile-friendly aspects of a website to rank and index it. Thus, creating a mobile-friendly website is important to rank well on search engines.
- The number of social signals is another aspect of a higher DA score. A website with more social shares will have a higher DA score than other websites.
- A website with high-quality content will have a better DA score.
- Focus on improving your blog or website from a technical, off-page, and on-page SEO point of view to boost your DA score.
How to Increase the DR Score of a Website?
Here are some points to keep in mind to boost the DR score of your website:
- Increase the number of do-follow links directing to the main website
- Use the links of websites with a higher Domain Rating (DR).
- Increase the number of other websites pointing to a website
- Increase the number of web pages from a domain linking to a site
Why Should You Care About Domain Rating and Domain Authority?
Although you don’t need to focus on DR and DA completely, you can’t ignore them. DR helps you identify which website is good for you to take links from. This metric helps you in link building and getting quality links for your site.
Domain Authority helps you evaluate the overall performance of a website. It would be best to focus on creating unique content and optimizing pages for search engines as well.
Of course, you can use these metrics, but you should also consider other factors such as organic traffic, content quality, anchor text ratios, and more to ensure you get an accurate overview of a site’s value. This ensures you will get high-quality links from sites with real traffic and a good reputation.
Conclusion:
Many SEO, link building, and ORM experts heavily depend on Domain Authority and Domain Rating to determine whether a website is worth approaching for a backlink. However, these shouldn’t be the only metrics that you consider. Also, focus on other factors like the overall design, quality content, anchor text, and more to analyze your SEO performance and reach your target audiences more effectively.
To avoid penalties, businesses should focus on building high-quality backlink portfolios with domains having absolute authority – and this goes beyond DA and DR metrics.
When you acquire link building services from professionals, you can be sure that your backlinks will be placed in high DR domains, which will boost your DA as well.