Domain rating: what DR measures, what it does not, and how sellers inflate it
Every marketplace lists a rating next to every domain. It is the number buyers filter on, the number sellers optimise, and the number that says least about whether a link will do anything. It measures inbound links, inbound links can be acquired, and a domain built to have a rating looks identical to a domain that earned one until you look at anything else.
What does domain rating measure?
The strength of a domain’s inbound link profile on a logarithmic 0–100 scale, as computed by a third-party index from the links it has crawled. It is a property of the link graph, not of the site: no traffic, no rankings, no readers enter into it. Different indexes compute different numbers; a “DR 60” is one vendor’s reading and correlates with another’s at only 0.36 on our sample.
How is a rating bought?
Links from other rated domains raise it, so a network of sites that link to each other, or a domain bought expired with its old links intact, arrives at a rating without ever having a reader. The signature is the rating with nothing behind it: authority in the link graph, and effectively no organic search visibility. Across the domains we measure, 24.7% carry that signature, and it peaks in the DR DR 90 band, where 50.6% fail, because that is the range most budgets buy in.
Why do we keep the claimed DR and measure separately?
Because the disagreement is the signal. The seller’s claimed DR stays on the row as the scale buyers think in; beside it we record an independent rank (0–1000, different scale, never merged), measured traffic, ranking keywords, referring domains and spam score. A claimed 73 with no keywords and 21 referring domains is the shape of bought authority, and a buyer can only see that if both numbers survive to the response. Replacing one with the other, which we tried, silently rewrote every DR filter in the product.
What does a DR cost?
By claimed decade on root domains, suspect excluded: DR 30–39 placements run a median $170, DR 50–59 $252, DR 70–79 $653. The steps are steep, and the cheap end of each band is where the failures cluster: an ask far below its band is priced like the rating was bought. Bands and distributions are on the pricing pages.
How should you use DR?
- As a coarse filter, never as the decision.
dr_minnarrows the catalogue; verification, traffic and topic choose within it. - Read a subdomain’s DR as its parent’s. A blog on a free host inherits the host’s 90 and has none of it; rows say
subdomain_of. - Prefer a verified DR 45 to an unverified DR 65. “Unverified” is not a pass.
- Use Placement Score when you want one number: it folds authority in at a quarter weight beside visibility, quality, graph and survival, and caps suspect domains at 40.
Every row carries both numbers, so the brief can ask for the honest version:
“Show me DR 50+ finance placements that pass verification, sorted by Placement Score, with the claimed and measured figures side by side.”
Methods: research methodology.