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Want the numbers for your own site right away? Check your DR for free — DR4, DR3 and Open PageRank for your site and up to three competitors in seconds.
DR is probably the best-known number in SEO. Clients ask agencies about it, case studies boast about it, and link marketplaces price their placements by it. Yet few people can explain what it actually measures, or why a competitor’s is higher.
There’s news, too: on 1 December 2026 the metric moves to a new version, DR4, and many sites will see their number change. Below we cover what DR is, how it’s calculated, what DR4 changes, what counts as a good DR, and how to check it for free and raise it without putting your site at risk.
Domain Rating, or DR, is a metric showing the relative strength of a site’s backlink profile, meaning all the links pointing to it from other websites. The scale runs from 0 to 100: zero means almost nobody links to the site, while 90+ belongs to the biggest media outlets, social networks and marketplaces.
DR rates links, not the site as a whole. A site can have excellent content, fast pages and hundreds of orders a month, and still have a DR of 3 because nobody has written about it yet. The reverse is also true: a high DR guarantees neither traffic nor sales.
Other SEO tools have similar metrics: Moz has Domain Authority, Semrush has Authority Score, Majestic has Trust Flow, and Open PageRank is built on Common Crawl’s open data. Each is calculated from its own link index with its own formula, so you can’t compare one site’s DR with another site’s DA — only like with like.
The exact formula is private, but the principle is well known. It resembles the classic PageRank, except that it works between websites rather than pages:
This leads to a few things worth knowing before you do anything about links:
On 5 November 2026, the metric’s developer introduced its new DR4 model. It becomes the default on 1 December, while the old DR3 will remain available for comparison for a short time. The principle hasn’t changed: only links count. What has changed is which links count, and how much.
| DR3 (old version) | DR4 (new version) | |
|---|---|---|
| Which domains count | every domain in the index | a smaller, higher-quality pool of domains; roughly half as many sites get a rating |
| Link weight | depends on the linking site’s DR and how many sites it links to | the same, plus more weight for linking sites with organic search traffic |
| Subdomains | usually inherit the root domain’s DR | get their own DR based on their own links |
| Spammy links | hundreds of links from “dead” sites can push the number up | have almost no effect |
According to the metric’s developer, spam domains with a DR3 between 30 and 70 lost the most: a median drop of 15–20 points. For ordinary sites, the median change is close to zero. Among the thousand sites with the most search traffic, DR rose for 64.3%, stayed the same for 15.8% and fell for 19.9%, mostly by a few points.
The second big change is subdomains. Previously, a blog on blog.example.com or a site on a website builder’s free subdomain inherited the root domain’s rating. Now every subdomain has its own DR: insights.samsung.com, for example, went from 92 to 74, and a user’s site on a notion.site subdomain from 92 to 0.
The developer compared both versions across 10 million sites and subdomains: the correlation with reaching Google’s top 3 rose from 0.13 to 0.33. But there’s a nuance that rarely gets mentioned: for root domains alone, without subdomains, the old version actually correlates better — 0.38 versus 0.30. In other words, DR4 is above all a fairer score for subdomains and spam, not a better predictor of an ordinary site’s rankings.
What site owners should do: look at both versions side by side. If your DR4 is well below your DR3, a lot of sites without search traffic probably link to you. It’s worth finding out where they came from and not building more of them. Subdomains are the exception: their DR4 is often lower simply because they no longer inherit the root domain’s DR.
Not directly. DR is calculated by a third-party tool from its own index, and Google doesn’t use it. But DR reflects something Google really does take into account: links from other websites. That’s why sites with a higher DR tend to rank higher, although the relationship is far from direct, with a correlation of around 0.3.
Even more important: Google ranks pages, not websites. A page that answers the query best and earns links of its own can outrank a page on a site whose DR is 20 points higher. So DR is useful as a benchmark, for comparing yourself with competitors and choosing where to get mentioned, but not as a goal. If your site isn’t growing, links are often not the reason at all: we cover the other common causes in “Why Your Site Is Not Growing in Google: 15 Reasons”.
There’s no universal benchmark, but these are rough guidelines:
| DR | What it usually means |
|---|---|
| 0 | almost nobody links to the site; normal for a new site |
| 1–19 | typical for small businesses, local companies and young online shops |
| 20–39 | a solid profile: you can compete for medium-difficulty keywords |
| 40–59 | a strong profile, the level of well-known industry sites and large shops |
| 60+ | major media, marketplaces, government sites, international brands |
Far more useful than the table is comparing yourself with the sites you actually compete with. Open Google, search for your business’s main keyword and check the DR of the sites on the first page. If they have a DR of 15–25 and yours is 3, the gap in links is one of the reasons you’re not there. If the top results are all DR 70+, a new site is better off starting with narrower keywords: a specific district, service or product.
The quickest way is our DR checker. Enter your domain and, if you like, up to three competitors. You’ll see:
To see the links themselves rather than just a number, add your site to Google Search Console: the Links report shows which sites link to you and to which pages. Bing Webmaster Tools offers a similar report for free.
A tip: don’t just look at your own number, look at who links to your competitors. Sites that mention two or three of your competitors but not you are a ready-made list to start with.
DR only grows when sites that haven’t linked to you before start doing so. Content, speed and design matter a lot for rankings, but they don’t change DR. Here are approaches that work in 2026 without putting your site at risk.
The easiest links come from people you already work with. A manufacturer can add you to its dealer list, a supplier to its “Where to buy” page, a client to a case study or partners page. These links are natural and relevant, and they often come from sites with search traffic, exactly the kind DR4 values most.
Journalists need specialists who can quickly provide a comment backed by numbers. Respond to editorial requests, pitch columns, share real case studies. One mention in a well-known industry publication is worth more than dozens of directory links.
People link to useful things without being asked: research and data about your market, calculators, templates, guides, free tools. If you know your niche better than anyone, gather that knowledge into one resource that’s easy to cite from a forum, an article or a social media post.
Industry associations, professional rankings, local directories and profiles on platforms like Clutch or DOU are a normal part of a link profile. The test is simple: do real people visit it? A directory with no search traffic will do almost nothing for DR4. If your business serves one city, our article on local SEO and Google Maps will help here.
After a redesign or migration, some old URLs often return 404, and the links pointing to them are wasted. Find those pages and add 301 redirects to current ones; we explain how to do it properly in “301 vs 302 Redirects”. While you’re at it, fix your site address in old profiles and directories if you’ve changed domains.
Search for your company name on Google: people often write about you without linking. A short email to the author thanking them and asking for a link works more often than you’d think.
The most common mistake is setting a target like “DR 30 by the end of the year”. You can raise the number with links that bring neither rankings nor clients. The move to DR4 shows that these are exactly the links that will lose value first.
Measure what brings in money: rankings for your target keywords, organic traffic to commercial pages, enquiries and sales. DR is one diagnostic number among many, like a temperature reading at the doctor’s: important, but it isn’t what gets treated. For a full plan from indexing to links, see “How to Get Your Site to the Top of Google”.
If you want to know exactly what your site is missing, start with a free comparison against your competitors:
DR is a handy way to sum up the strength of a backlink profile and compare yourself with competitors. In the new DR4 it’s fairer: spammy links and sites without search traffic count for less, and subdomains are scored separately. But it’s still a benchmark, not a goal. Check your site and your competitors with our free DR checker, see who links to the leaders in your niche, and earn mentions where real people will read about you. If you need help, get in touch and we’ll start with a free comparison against your competitors.
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