How to increase Domain Rating or Domain Authority, and whether you should

Domain Rating (DR) and Domain Authority (DA) go up when more websites with strong link profiles of their own link to you with followed links. Nothing else moves them honestly. Publishing more pages, fixing technical faults or getting ten more links from a site that already links to you will not change the score.

Whether you should try is a separate question, and the short answer is no. Both scores are estimates made by tool vendors, not by Google, and Google has denied using Domain Authority. Aim for links that help rankings and the score will follow. Aim for the score and you can raise it without helping rankings at all.

What actually moves each score

Domain Rating. Ahrefs’ help page describes the calculation. It looks at which domains link to you with followed links, how strong those domains are, and how many other domains each of them links to. A linking domain “splits its rating equally amongst the domains it links to”. The raw result is then scaled to 0 to 100. Ahrefs’ 2022 article on the metric adds that only the first link from a domain increases your DR.

So three things raise DR: more unique referring domains, stronger referring domains, and referring domains that link out to fewer sites.

Domain Authority. Moz describes DA as a machine learning model that predicts how likely a site is to rank, built from link data in its own index. Moz’s page on Page Authority, dated November 2024, says both scores use the same method, change as the data fed into the model changes, and are best used as relative metrics for comparison.

Both scales are logarithmic. Each step is harder than the one before, so the same effort that took a site from 10 to 30 may move it from 60 to 62. What authority metrics measure sets the scores side by side.

Ways that work, because they are just link building

There is no separate craft of raising DR. The tactics are the ordinary ones, chosen for unique, relevant, followed referring domains.

Tactic	Why it moves the score	Cost and effort
Link reclamation	Recovers referring domains you already earned and lost	Low. Usually the cheapest work available
Unlinked mentions	Turns existing coverage into links from new domains	Low
Partner and supplier links	New domains that have a real reason to link	Low
Linkable assets	Research, tools and guides attract links from many domains over time	Medium to high, slow
Digital PR	Coverage on strong news domains	High, priced by campaign
Guest articles on relevant sites	One new domain per article	Medium

If you are starting from nothing, your first 100 links puts these in order.

Things that do not move it

• More links from the same site. By Ahrefs’ description only the first followed link from a domain counts towards DR.
• Nofollow links. They are left out of the DR calculation.
• More content. Semrush makes the same point about its own Authority Score in an April 2025 guide: adding pages does not improve the score.
• Internal links. They help individual pages. They do not change a domain-level score.
• Low-quality directories. Semrush’s guide lists these among things that will not improve its score.

Why the number is a poor target

It is weakly tied to rankings. In Ahrefs’ study of one million keywords, published in January 2025, DR correlated with rankings at 0.131. Referring domains to the ranking page scored 0.255. Links to the page you want to rank matter more than the site-wide total.

The vendor says not to. Ahrefs’ 2022 article states that although DR correlates with search traffic, “you should not focus your efforts on growing this metric specifically”, and that DR and traffic grow as a by-product of good content and links.

It ignores relevance. A link from an unrelated site with a high score raises DR as much as one from the leading site in your field. Only the second is likely to help you rank.

It ignores traffic and spam. Ahrefs’ own article admits that large amounts of low-quality backlinks may increase DR, not decrease it. A number that spam can raise is not a measure of trust.

It moves on its own. Ahrefs’ help page explains that when the strongest sites gain backlinks they cannot go above 100, so other sites are pushed down. Your DR can fall in a month when you lost nothing.

The shortcuts and why to avoid them

Because buyers and clients look at the number, a trade exists in raising it. Our research lists the methods: redirecting expired domains with strong profiles, buying links from high-rated sites that link out to very few domains, spam from profile pages on high-rated platforms, and groups of sites that link to each other. Marketplaces list “DR 70+” packages that sell the result.

These work on the formula, not on search. Ahrefs wrote in 2022 that some black hat SEOs had found ways to inflate DR with link spam, and that it had identified many of those methods and closed them. A site that buys such a package may see the number rise and then fall when the method stops working. In between, it has a visible block of spam links and a redirect history that a careful buyer or partner will notice. How link metrics get faked explains how to recognise an inflated score.

When the score does matter

There are honest reasons to care about the number.

• You sell placements or are being valued for sale. Buyers filter by score, so it affects price.
• A client or manager reports on it. Explain what it is, then report referring domains and organic traffic beside it.
• You are tracking direction. A rising score over a year confirms that new referring domains are arriving faster than old ones are lost.

In each case, read it next to organic traffic. A score that rises while traffic stays flat is a warning, not a result.

What to track instead

1. New referring domains per month, counted once each, with relevance noted.
2. Referring domains to your priority pages, compared with the pages that outrank you.
3. Organic clicks and rankings for those pages.
4. The share of new links that are still live and indexed after 90 days.

A link gap analysis tells you how far behind competitors you are in terms that relate to rankings. The score will follow these numbers.

Where to go next

Use the backlink tools comparison to pick one tool and stay with it, since scores from different tools cannot be compared. Terms such as referring domain and followed link are defined in the glossary.