What is Domain Rating, and does a DR 90 link help you?

Domain Rating is Ahrefs' score for how strong a site's backlink profile is, on a logarithmic 0 to 100 scale. Moz calls their version Domain Authority. Both are third-party estimates.

Google does not use either one. They are not a ranking factor, they are a convenience someone built to summarise a link graph in one number, and every list of directories sorts by them because it is the only comparable number anyone publishes.

We sort our own directory list by DR too. It is the least bad option, and it is still worth knowing what it does and does not tell you.

The logarithmic part is the part people miss

DR is not linear. The distance from 70 to 80 is far larger than the distance from 30 to 40.

That cuts both ways. A DR 91 site really is enormously better connected than a DR 40 one. But it also means the difference between DR 45 and DR 55 is close to noise, so ordering an afternoon's work by those two numbers is false precision.

Why a DR 90 directory link is usually worth less than it looks

Four reasons, and most high-DR directory links hit at least two.

The score belongs to the domain, not the page. DR 91 describes the whole of a site. Your listing is one page on it, probably reachable in four clicks from the homepage, with no links of its own. The credit that flows to it is a small fraction of what the number implies.

Most of them are nofollow anyway. A directory that lets anyone add a link and does not mark those links is a directory with a spam problem. The good ones mark them. In our catalogue 185 of 192 are listed as passing a followed link, and that figure is the source list's claim rather than something we verified on every one.

Nobody links to your listing. A page's own authority comes from what points at it. A directory entry with zero inbound links is a leaf, and a leaf on a big tree is still a leaf.

Everyone else has the same link. A link every competitor can also get for free is not an advantage. It is table stakes at best.

What to look at instead

Traffic. Does anybody actually use this directory? A DR 45 site your buyers browse weekly beats a DR 90 site nobody opens. This is the single most useful question and it is the one the DR column cannot answer.

Whether the page gets crawled. A listing on a page four clicks deep with no internal links is a page Google may never index. Search for an existing listing on the site and see if it comes up.

Relevance. A link from a place about your category is worth more than a general directory with a higher score. Google has been reasonably good at this for a long time.

What else comes with it. A listing that generates a real page about your product is worth more than a row in a table, because it can rank for its own long-tail queries rather than only passing credit.

So should you ignore DR

No. Use it as a rough sort, in bands rather than as an ordering.

• DR 80+: worth doing, all 22 of them in our list.
• DR 50 to 79: worth doing if it is free and takes under five minutes.
• Below DR 50: only if the directory is specifically about your niche.

That is the whole of it. It is a sorting hint, not a target.

One more thing about our own number

We are DR 30. We put ourselves first on our list and we show the 30 in the same table as SourceForge's 92, because hiding it would make the rest of the numbers worth less.

If you want the version of this that matters more than any score: a listing here is free, gets a real page and a written review of your app, and both of those are followed links.