SEOs doubt the new link score landing December 1
Ahrefs says its rebuilt Domain Rating tracks Google rankings far better, and some SEOs say their own sites prove otherwise.
Ahrefs is changing the way it scores websites on December 1, and SEOs are publicly arguing about whether the new score means anything.
The change itself was announced earlier by Glen Allsopp (@viperchill), who works at Ahrefs. Domain Rating, or DR, is a 0 to 100 score Ahrefs gives a site based on its backlinks (links from other sites pointing to yours). In the new model, subdomains get their own rating, so the Ahrefs help desk scores DR 75 while the main domain scores DR 92. The pool of domains that feed into the score has roughly halved, to about 132 million. Allsopp says that in testing, the new model lines up with actual Google rankings more than 2.5 times better than the old one.
The pushback
Noel Ceta (@noelcetaseo) says he does not buy it. He posted a Search Console screenshot of a site rated DR1, with no links he built, pulling about 1,500 clicks a day. He also says he can show hundreds of sites rated DR 50 or above getting fewer than 100 clicks a month. His site's 606 referring domains, he says, are auto-spam he had nothing to do with.
Charles Floate (@charles_seo) says the new system is already causing a stir in the link building world, and claims even Google itself lost DR in the update.
What this means for you
If you have never looked at your Domain Rating, nothing here changes your website. DR is a number one SEO tool invented. Google does not use it, and the argument this week is a reminder that a high score and real traffic are not the same thing.
If you do track DR, expect your number to move on December 1 without anything happening to your site. Do not treat a drop as a penalty and do not go buy links to push it back up. Allsopp says Ahrefs has opened a feedback form for a short period and will read the comments himself.
The one number worth watching instead is clicks. Open Search Console, click Performance, and compare the last 28 days to the previous period. That tells you whether Google is sending you people. A score in a third party tool does not.
Unfortunately, DR can easily be manipulated.
I can show you my site with DR1 and no links built generating 1.5k clicks a day.
Be the person who already knew
One email a day. Under three minutes. You will hear about a Google change before it shows up in your traffic.