Domain Rating

The domain rating is a key performance indicator in the field of search engine optimization, which is calculated by the SEO tool ahrefs. It is used to determine the trustworthiness of a website based on a scale of 0 to 100.

Definition

The domain rating is one of the most important factors for search engines. For Google and Co it plays a central role in the positioning of a website on the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). In this regard, this concept is very similar to the idea of Domain Authority. Domain Rating is the name used by the company Ahrefs.

Based on a numerical value between 0 and 100, the Domain Rating indicates the trustworthiness of a website. With this Key Performance Indicator (KPI) you can see at a glance how trustworthy your site is rated by Ahrefs. The higher the value, the better.

Crawlers scan the website to determine the authority of a website based on KPIs such as domain trust, text quality, bounce rate or backlinks. This authority of a domain – or its domain rating – is supposed to express how trustworthy and how present a site is on the net. In order to measure this presence, providers such as Ahrefs count the backlinks – the incoming links to a website from third parties – among other things.

Backlinks as an influencing factor for the domain rating

Because backlinks are very important for the search engine optimization (SEO) of a website, you can use the domain rating to improve your SEO work.Backlinks are also used by search engines to assign your site an authority on its topic. Any link from a site that enjoys a high domain rating itself is valuable to you.

However, a backlink from a site with a bad domain rating from a bad neighborhood will hurt your own rating. You have to keep in mind that a link from a “bad neighborhood” will hurt you much more than a valuable backlink will benefit you. That’s why it’s very important for you to identify bad backlinks. To remove them, you can use the Google Disavow tool.

Just like the Domain Rating, the Domain Authority is a construct that only gains significance by comparing your website with other websites. If you are working on your link building, a domain rating check at Ahrefs for your site as well as those of your competitors will quickly tell you which site you should be looking at for backlinks.

How can you improve your domain rating?

If you want to improve your page’s position in the SERPs, working on your Page Authority is an important part of your SEO work. The most important part of your work to achieve a high domain ranking is to improve your content.

How user-friendly and informative are your texts? Have you written your texts in such a way that the crawlers of the search engines can capture them well? Is your website clear and concise? Does it provide valuable information to your audience? Do you have enough quality backlinks? If your target audience finds your site and uses it regularly, your domain rating will consequently increase. In the area of Technical SEO you can optimize your information architecture and improve your loading times.

Conclusion

The Domain Rating is a useful metric that allows you to see how good your SEO work is, on the one hand, and estimate how valuable your previous backlinks are, on the other.

If you achieve a high value in your regular Domain Rating Check, you can assume that your site will also achieve a good position in the SERPs in the long term. At the same time, by analyzing the results of the sites that link to your site, you can tell if you have good backlinks.