Domain Rating vs Domain Authority: DR and DA Compared

Domain Rating (DR) and Domain Authority (DA) are both scores that estimate how strong a website's backlink profile is. DR is made by Ahrefs and DA is made by Moz. They measure a similar idea in different ways, so the same site will usually have different scores on each.

Neither is a Google metric. Google doesn't use either score, and Moz says plainly that Domain Authority is not a Google ranking factor and has no effect on the search results.

They're still useful, as long as you treat them as rough, comparative guides and not targets. This page explains how each is calculated, how they differ and what a "good" score actually means.

DR vs DA at a glance

	Domain Rating (DR)	Domain Authority (DA)
Made by	Ahrefs	Moz
Scale	0 to 100, logarithmic	1 to 100
What it measures	Strength of a site's backlink profile	Predicted ability of a site to rank, based mainly on links
How it's calculated	From followed links from unique domains, weighted by each linking domain's own DR and how many sites it links to	A machine learning model using linking root domains, link quality and other signals that correlate with rankings
Counts nofollow links?	No, nofollow-only links don't raise DR	Not specified in Moz's public explanation
Uses traffic?	No, Ahrefs describes it as purely link-based	Not described as an input
Used by Google?	No	No, Moz says it is not a Google ranking factor

All details are from Ahrefs' and Moz's own explanations of their metrics, checked in October 2026.

How Ahrefs calculates Domain Rating

Ahrefs describes the calculation in three steps. It finds every domain with at least one followed link to the target site, looks at how many other domains each of those linking domains links to, then passes on "DR juice" by dividing each linking domain's DR by the number of unique domains it links to. The result is scaled to a 0 to 100 range.

A few consequences follow from that method, all confirmed by Ahrefs:

• Only the first link from a domain counts. Extra links from a site that already links to you don't raise your DR, which is why referring domains matter more than backlink totals
• Nofollow links don't count. A site linking to you only with nofollow links won't increase your DR
• Generous linkers pass less. If a site keeps linking out to more and more new domains, the DR juice it sends each of them falls
• Traffic is ignored. DR doesn't account for a site's search traffic, domain age or brand popularity

The idea of a site splitting its strength across every site it links to is the same logic behind link juice and Google's original PageRank.

How Moz calculates Domain Authority

Moz calculates DA with a machine learning algorithm that mainly uses backlink data. It describes the inputs as the number of linking root domains, the quality of those links and other signals that correlate with rankings across thousands of search results. The model predicts how likely a domain is to appear in Google's results compared with competitors.

Moz overhauled the metric in 2019 with Domain Authority 2.0, which changed how scores are calculated. Moz also notes that DA can move without anything changing on your site, for example when the scores of other sites, especially very large ones, shift the relative scale.

Moz recommends using DA as a comparative metric rather than an absolute one, and says there's no universally good score.

Why the scales get harder at the top

Ahrefs says DR is logarithmic, so the gap between DR 70 and DR 71 is much bigger than the gap between DR 20 and DR 21. Moz says something similar about DA: it's easier to grow from 20 to 30 than from 70 to 80, partly because the highest scores are taken by sites with enormous link profiles.

Neither company publishes the exact curve, but the shape looks something like this.

The practical lesson is that a jump from DR 10 to DR 30 can happen with a modest campaign, while moving a DR 70 site up a few points may take a very large number of strong links.

What is a good Domain Rating?

There's no universal answer, and neither Ahrefs nor Moz gives one. A good score is one that's competitive in your niche. A local accountant with DR 25 may have a stronger profile than any of its competitors, while a SaaS company with DR 50 may be the weakest site on page one.

The useful way to judge a score is relative to the sites you're competing with:

Situation	How to read the score
Your DR is close to the sites ranking for your keyword	Domain strength probably isn't your main gap, look at page-level links and content
Your DR is well below every site on page one	You likely need more referring domains across the whole site
A prospect's DR is high but it has almost no organic traffic	Treat it as a red flag, DR ignores traffic and can be inflated
A prospect's DR is modest but it's relevant with real traffic	Often a better link than a high-DR general site
Your DR dropped with no lost links	Possibly a shift in the scale or in a linking site's score, check before reacting

The method for comparing your profile with the sites that rank is in how many backlinks you need.

Why you shouldn't chase DR or DA

Both scores are easy to read and that makes them easy to game. Because DR ignores traffic and DA is a prediction built mostly on links, a site can carry a high score while getting no search visitors at all, which is common among sites that exist to sell links.

That matters when you're vetting a site for a link. Use DR or DA as a first filter, then check organic traffic, relevance and how many sites it links out to. The guide to buying backlinks has a full vetting checklist, and the guide to link building tools covers where to find each metric.

Other tools have their own versions too, such as Semrush's Authority Score and Majestic's Trust Flow. None of them are Google metrics either.

The short version

• DR is Ahrefs' score (0 to 100, logarithmic) and DA is Moz's (1 to 100), both estimating link profile strength
• DR is built from followed links from unique domains, DA from a machine learning model using linking root domains and other signals
• Google uses neither, and Moz says DA is not a ranking factor
• A good score is one that's competitive with the sites ranking in your niche, not a fixed number
• Check traffic and relevance before trusting any high score on a site you want a link from

Use DR and DA to compare and to filter, then let rankings and traffic tell you whether your links are working.