What we offer

NEW CASE
Serhii Illichov, Attorney at Law — business card website case study

We create digital solutions that work for businesses

Become a clientBecome a client
Give us a call +38 (066) 35-14-529

Let's take the first step towards your website — write to us

Close
Tools

Domain Rating (DR) checker

SEO and marketing

You may also like

Check any website’s DR for free: Domain Rating in the new DR4 and the old DR3, Open PageRank and its history since 2018, and referring domains — for your site and up to three competitors.

Compare with competitors — up to three

Pick the sites ranking at the top of Google for your main keyword: they are the ones you compete with.

Free audit

DR is just a number. We’ll show you how to raise it

We’ll compare your site with the competitors in Google’s top results for free: where their links come from, what you’re missing and what on your own site is holding growth back. You’ll get a report with a plan.

  • Your referring domains vs your competitors’
  • Sites where you could get mentioned
  • Technical issues holding growth back
  • A prioritised action plan
Learn more: SEO optimization

Report in 1–2 business days. No strings attached — if everything’s fine, we’ll say so.

By clicking the button you agree to the privacy policy

What DR shows

Domain Rating (DR) scores the strength of a website’s backlink profile from 0 to 100. It’s often called website authority, but it doesn’t rate the site as a whole, only the links pointing to it from other sites.

Links only It counts the sites linking to you and how strong they are. Your traffic, content, design and domain age aren’t part of the number.
A logarithmic scale Going from 20 to 21 is much easier than from 70 to 71. The scale is relative: if other sites grow faster, your DR can slip a little even when you haven’t lost a single link.
One site, one vote Ten links from one domain are worth the same as one. Only followed links count, and it doesn’t matter whether they point to the home page or an inner page.
A linking site’s strength is split A site splits its weight equally among all the domains it links to. A link from a strong niche site that mentions only a few others is worth more than one from a site that links out to thousands of domains.

DR4: what changes on 1 December 2026

The metric has a new version. We show both while the old one is still available, so you can see how your own number will change.

Old version

DR3

The default until 1 December 2026.

  • Counts links from every domain in the index
  • Subdomains usually inherit the root domain’s DR
  • Hundreds of links from spam sites can push the number up
vs
New version

DR4

The default from 1 December 2026, and already in our checker.

  • A smaller, higher-quality pool of domains that can affect DR: roughly half as many sites get a score
  • Links from sites with organic search traffic carry more weight
  • Subdomains get their own DR

According to the metric’s developer, spam domains with a DR3 of 30–70 lost the most, with a median drop of 15–20 points, while for ordinary sites the median change is close to zero. If your DR4 is well below your DR3 and it isn’t a subdomain, review where your links come from.

What else the check shows

One number from one index isn’t much to go on. So next to DR we add an independent score built on open data, plus some context.

DR4 and DR3 Backlink profile strength under the new and old versions, and the difference between them.
Open PageRank A 0–10 score built on Common Crawl’s open link graph: 118 million domains and 2.8 billion connections between them. A second opinion that doesn’t depend on DR.
Rank The domain’s position among all domains in the Open PageRank data. The lower the number, the stronger the site.
Referring domains A weighted count of the sites linking to yours. It’s the number of different sites, not links, that moves DR up.
History How Open PageRank has changed month by month since 2018. You can see when the site started growing and what happened after a migration or redesign.
Domain age The registration date from RDAP. A DR of 5 means something very different on a six-month-old domain than on a ten-year-old one.

How to raise DR

DR is a result, not a goal. It grows with the number of real, active sites linking to you.

Links from sites people actually read In DR4, links from sites with their own search traffic count most: industry media, associations, partners and suppliers, local news.
A reason to link to you Research and data about your market, calculators, expert comments for journalists. People link to useful things on their own, and those links don’t vanish a year later.
Win back lost links If pages that used to earn links now return 404, 301-redirect them to current ones. Fix your site address in old profiles and directories.
Don’t buy spam Hundreds of links from sites with no search traffic could lift DR3. DR4 barely counts them, and Google discounts or penalises such schemes.

Useful alongside this tool

WHOIS / RDAP Lookup Domain owner, registrar and expiry date. Website Malware Scanner Malicious code, SEO spam, cloaking for Google, exposed files and blacklists. Website Speed Audit Site speed: TTFB, weight, caching and a 0–100 score.

Read more on the blog

What Is Domain Rating (DR) and How to Increase It: DR4, Free Checks and What Works in 2026 Domain Rating in plain English: how it’s calculated, what the new DR4 changes from 1 December 2026, what counts as a good DR, and how to che
Rate this tool
It tells us what to improve first
Be the first to rate 5.0 of 5 1 vote

FAQ

What is a website’s DR?
Domain Rating scores the strength of a site’s backlink profile on a 0–100 scale. The more independent sites link to yours, and the stronger they are, the higher your DR. Your own traffic, content and domain age aren’t part of the number.
How do I check a website’s DR?
Enter the domain in the form at the top of the page and click “Check”: in a few seconds you’ll see DR4, DR3, Open PageRank, referring domains and history. To compare yourself with competitors, add up to three of their domains. Your first three checks each hour need no verification; after that there’s a simple captcha.
Does DR affect Google rankings?
Not directly: Google doesn’t use DR, it’s a third-party metric. But it reflects links that Google does take into account, so sites with a higher DR tend to rank higher. DR4’s correlation with reaching Google’s top 3 is around 0.3: noticeable, but far from perfect. And Google ranks pages, not domains.
Why is the DR here different from what I saw before?
From 1 December 2026 the new DR4 becomes the default. It counts links differently, so the number may change: by a few points for most ordinary sites, by 15–20 (the median drop) for spam domains, and sometimes by more for subdomains that used to inherit the root domain’s DR. We show both versions. Results are also cached for a day, and DR itself updates as the link index does.
What is a good DR?
There’s no universal benchmark. Compare yourself with the sites ranking at the top for your keywords: if theirs is 30 and yours is 8, the gap in links is one of the reasons they outrank you. That’s why the form lets you add up to three competitors.
What is Open PageRank and how is it different from DR?
It’s a 0–10 score calculated from Common Crawl’s open link graph. The data is different, so the numbers won’t match DR, but they usually point the same way. If DR is high and Open PageRank is low (or the other way round), look at where your links come from.
How quickly can I raise DR?
It depends on your niche and starting point. The scale is logarithmic: the first points come easier and each one after that is harder. New links affect DR only once the index finds them. More important than the number is growth in traffic to the pages those links point to.
Can I check a subdomain?
Yes, enter it in full, for example blog.example.com. In the new DR4, subdomains are scored separately from the root domain; in the old DR3 they usually get the root domain’s number. This check doesn’t score individual pages: DR always applies to the site as a whole.
Telegram Viber Call us