By Andrew Linksmith, Head of Link Acquisition · Update:
DA vs DR: Two Metrics, Two Companies, Two Indexes
Domain Authority is Moz's score and Domain Rating is Ahrefs' score. Both estimate the strength of a domain's backlink profile on a 0–100 logarithmic scale, using each company's own crawl and formula. Neither is used by Google, and neither is a ranking factor — they are third-party predictions, not measurements.
The thing most buyers do not know
Neither metric belongs to a search engine. Both are commercial products built by SEO tool companies to estimate something Google does not publish. When a vendor prices a link by DR, they are pricing it by one company's guess about another company's algorithm.
That does not make them useless. It makes them a filter rather than a verdict, and the difference between those two uses accounts for a great deal of wasted budget in this market.
DA vs DR side by side
| Domain Authority (DA) | Domain Rating (DR) |
Owner | Moz | Ahrefs |
Scale | 1–100, logarithmic | 0–100, logarithmic |
What it estimates | Likelihood of ranking, modelled against search results | Strength of the backlink profile |
Primary inputs | Linking root domains, total links, model trained on SERPs | Linking domains weighted by their own DR and outbound counts |
Update frequency | Roughly monthly, in batches | Continuous as the index refreshes |
Free access | Limited monthly queries | Limited via free webmaster tools |
The most consequential row is the third. DA tries to predict ranking ability, so it moves when Moz retrains its model — even if nothing about your site changed. DR describes the link profile only, so it moves when your links move. Neither is more correct; they answer different questions, which is why they disagree.
What each metric actually measures
Domain Rating reflects the strength of a domain's backlink profile relative to every other site in Ahrefs' index, on a hundred-point scale. A higher score generally indicates a site with more, and more authoritative, referring domains. It says nothing about traffic, relevance or content quality.
Domain Authority is a machine-learning prediction of how likely a domain is to rank, trained against actual search results. Because it is a model output rather than a direct calculation, a site's DA can shift when Moz updates the model, independent of any change in its links.
Both are logarithmic, and this is the property people most often misread.
DR 0 → 20 — Weeks. A handful of ordinary links.
DR 20 → 40 — Months. Sustained acquisition.
DR 40 → 60 — A year or more of consistent work.
DR 60 → 80 — Several years, or significant media coverage.
DR 80 → 90 — Rarely achievable through deliberate link building alone.
Practical consequence: a client target of "get us to DR 60" sounds like twice the work of DR 30 and is closer to ten times. Anyone quoting a timeline for a specific score without knowing your starting point is guessing.
Why the two numbers disagree
Same domain, checked the same day
Domain Rating (Ahrefs) — DR 41
Domain Authority (Moz) — DA 27
Referring domains, Ahrefs index — 1,840
Referring domains, Moz index — 1,105
Gap explained by — Different crawlers, different index sizes, different formulas, different refresh cycles
Four causes, all structural:
Different crawlers see different webs. Each company runs its own crawl with its own budget and priorities. Neither index is complete, and they miss different things.
Different formulas. DR weights linking domains by their own DR and outbound link counts. DA runs a trained model. Given identical input data they would still produce different numbers.
Different refresh cycles. One updates continuously, the other in batches. A site that gained fifty links last week will show the change in one before the other.
Model retraining. DA specifically can move for every site at once when Moz updates its model. This regularly produces alarmed clients asking what went wrong when nothing did.
The operational rule: compare publishers within one metric only. A vendor requirement of "DR 50 or DA 50" without naming the source is not a specification — it is two different requirements written as one.
Both metrics can be manipulated
Services that inflate these scores are sold openly on freelance marketplaces for around a hundred dollars. They work by pointing large volumes of links at a domain, which moves a third-party score without producing any organic traffic, any readership or any editorial standing. Delivery typically takes a few weeks.
This is not a fringe practice. It is the reason a market that prices links primarily by DR is partly pricing the output of a hundred-dollar service. A publisher can present at DR 55 with forty monthly visitors, and most vendor catalogues will list it in a higher price band than a DR 34 site with eleven thousand.
Signal of an inflated score | What to look at |
High rating, negligible organic traffic | The single fastest check. A wide gap favouring rating is the answer. |
Referring domains concentrated in a short period | The link growth curve — a vertical step rather than accumulation |
Referring domains that are themselves traffic-free | Open ten of them. Inflation is usually built from inflated material. |
No brand presence outside the domain | Search the site name. Real publications exist elsewhere. |
Score far above every comparable site in the niche | An outlier in a small market is usually an artefact, not a leader |
The correction takes ten seconds and eliminates most bad inventory: put the rating and the monthly organic traffic side by side before you look at anything else. Ahrefs has reported that fewer than one site in ten in its index receives any organic search traffic at all, which means a publisher with genuine readership is already unusual — and unusual in a way that cannot be bought for a hundred dollars. Full framework in the six criteria for link quality, and the network-detection version in how to recognise a PBN.
Which metrics to actually use
Organic traffic to the specific page — The hardest signal to fake and the most predictive of whether a link can do anything. For an insertion, check the host URL rather than the domain.
Topical relevance of the linking article — Assessed at article level. Determines what you become relevant for, not just how strong you look.
Referring domains to that page — Page-level, not domain-level. A strong domain routinely contains thousands of pages nobody links to.
Outbound commercial link density — How many ways the page divides what it has. Five or more unrelated commercial links is a quality problem.
DA or DR — Useful as a first-pass sort when you are looking at four hundred candidate domains. Never as the deciding factor on any individual one.
The order matters more than the list. Most buying processes run it backwards — sort by DR, buy the top of the list, never open the pages. That process is what the hundred-dollar inflation service was built to exploit.
Andrew Linksmith sells link building services and uses Ahrefs in its own work, which is worth knowing when reading a comparison of Ahrefs' metric against a competitor's. Metric definitions reflect each vendor's published documentation. Organic traffic distribution figures: Ahrefs. Illustrative DA/DR figures are representative of gaps we observe routinely rather than a specific named domain.