Domain Rating: What It Is & How to Check It Free
Domain Rating (DR) is a metric that scores your website's backlink authority on a scale of 0 to 100. Higher DR generally correlates with better search rankings.
How Domain Rating Works
DR is calculated based on:
- •Number of referring domains — How many unique websites link to you
- •Quality of referring domains — Links from high-DR sites count more
- •Link diversity — Links from many different domains beat many links from one domain
A brand-new website starts at DR 0. Major sites like Wikipedia or Google have DR 90+.
DR Benchmarks
| DR Range | What It Means |
|---|---|
| 0-10 | New site, minimal backlinks |
| 10-30 | Building authority, some quality links |
| 30-50 | Established site, competitive for medium keywords |
| 50-70 | Strong authority, can rank for competitive terms |
| 70+ | Top-tier authority, industry leader |
How to Check Domain Rating for Free
Create a free SEOBolt account, open Dashboard → Domain Rating, and enter any domain. SEOBolt's score is not Ahrefs' DR: it comes from Common Crawl's public web graph, which ranks domains by harmonic centrality. That rank is mapped to 0-100 on a log scale across the top 10 million domains, so rank 1 scores 100 and a domain outside that slice scores 0, with the reason shown instead of a guessed number. For example, semrush.com sat at harmonic rank 593 in the loaded release, which maps to a score of about 60. If the graph has no rank for a domain, backlinks you imported for your own project are used instead. Results are cached for 7 days.
API option:
curl "https://seobolt.app/api/domain-rating?domain=example.com" \
-H "Authorization: Bearer sk_live_your_key"AI agents can run the same lookup with the seo_domain_rating MCP tool.
How to Improve Your DR
- Create linkable content — Original research, tools, and comprehensive guides earn natural backlinks
- Guest posting — Write for industry blogs with links back to your site
- Build relationships — Networking leads to organic link opportunities
- Create free tools — Calculators, checkers, and widgets attract links
- Fix broken links on other sites — Find broken links on high-DR sites and suggest your content as a replacement
- Directory listings — Submit to Product Hunt, AlternativeTo, G2, and industry directories
DR vs DA (Domain Authority)
Domain Rating (Ahrefs) and Domain Authority (Moz) are similar concepts but use different algorithms. They usually correlate but can differ by 10-20 points for the same domain, and SEOBolt's Common Crawl score is a third, independent method. None of them is a direct Google ranking factor — they're third-party estimates of backlink strength.
If you're weighing an Ahrefs alternative, compare where each tool gets its authority data before trusting the number.
Does DR Directly Affect Rankings?
No. Google doesn't use DR or DA in their algorithm. However, DR correlates with ranking ability because it measures backlink strength, and backlinks ARE a confirmed Google ranking factor. Think of DR as a useful proxy, not a direct ranking signal.
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