Domain Rating (DR) vs Domain Authority (DA): Demystifying Off-Page Authority Metrics
Comparing Ahrefs Domain Rating (DR) and Moz Domain Authority (DA), how logarithmic scales work, and why organic traffic matters most.
Marcus Vance
Head of Digital Outreach & Link Acquisition
May 08, 20268 min read
Key Strategic Takeaways
- DR measures the relative strength of a website's backlink profile compared to all other sites in the index.
- DA predicts how well a domain will rank in SERPs based on a combination of link metrics and machine learning.
- Always verify that a high-DR domain receives genuine organic search traffic before acquiring a link.
1. How Authority Scores are Calculated
While Google does not expose internal PageRank scores publicly, third-party SEO tools calculate estimated authority metrics on logarithmic 1 to 100 scales based on referring link quantity and quality.