How to read Domain Rating and traffic estimates without being misled
When you compare publishers, two numbers come up constantly: Domain Rating (DR) and estimated monthly organic traffic. Both are useful, and both are easy to over-read.
What Domain Rating is
Domain Rating is a metric from the SEO software company Ahrefs. It scores the strength of a website's backlink profile on a 0 to 100 scale, and the scale is logarithmic, so moving from 70 to 80 is much harder than moving from 20 to 30. It is computed from link data that Ahrefs collects.
What it is not
- It is not a Google metric, and Google does not use it. A high DR does not mean a site ranks well or that a link from it will help you rank.
- It says nothing directly about audience size, audience quality or editorial standards.
- It can be influenced by link-building, which is one reason it should never be the only filter.
Estimated traffic is a model, not a counter
Traffic figures from SEO tools are estimates: they model how many visits a site probably gets from search, based on the keywords it ranks for. They can be far off, particularly for small sites, for sites with lots of non-search traffic, and for new sites. A publisher's own analytics, once verified, is a different and usually better source. The two should be shown separately and never blended into one number.
A better way to compare publishers
- Start with topical fit: does the audience care about what you sell?
- Look at the page, not just the domain: is it current, and does a sponsored mention belong there?
- Check how many other sponsored links the page already carries.
- Use DR and traffic estimates as rough sorting aids, with the source and date visible.
- Treat missing data as unknown, not as zero and not as a pass.
This is how we plan to present publishers on LynkBack: third-party figures such as DR are shown where our data licence allows, with the source and measurement date, labeled as estimates where they are estimates, and alongside, not instead of, relevance and editorial information. LynkBack is not affiliated with Ahrefs.