What is a good Domain Rating — and why traffic beats the badge

It depends on how old the site is and what it is trying to rank for. A two-year-old blog at DR20 with real readers can be a good host. A twelve-year-old DR70 with an empty archive can be bad. There is no universal “good DR.” One number as a trophy is the badge, not the site.

Ahrefs Domain Rating is a third-party score of how strong a site’s inbound link profile looks inside Ahrefs. Moz Domain Authority is a different third-party score inside Moz. Google does not use DR or DA. We price English guest posts on Ahrefs DR bands because buyers already plan that way: $125 (DR20+), $175 (DR30+), $250 (DR40+, most popular), $275 (DR50+), $450 (DR70+). The badge is the price card. Traffic and outbound hygiene are the pass.

If you came here to pick a number for your own site, use competitors in your SERP as the yardstick, not a blog post that says “DR50 is good.” If you came here to pick a host to buy, open the host. Read domain rating vs domain authority for the metric comparison. This page is the “is this number good” version.

DR20 on a young site often means it has started to earn a few real citations. That can be a perfectly good guest-post host if the archive is on-topic and the traffic is from readers. DR20 on an aged site that should have more can mean the graph never happened — or it was cleaned. Do not assume young-and-low is junk, and do not assume old-and-low is safe. Look at the pages.

DR40 is the band most buyers on this desk can defend in a meeting: enough inbound graph to look like a publication, priced at $250 rather than jumping to DR50+ at $275. We mark it most popular because that is what gets ordered, not because Google has a DR40 threshold. A young site at DR40 can be a rocket or a purchased leftover. The publish dates and the outbound profile tell you which.

DR70 is scarce and expensive for a reason. It can be a real magazine. It can also be an expired domain wearing a new theme. At $450 you should be the most suspicious, not the most relaxed. Zero-traffic DR70s are leftover authority. We drop them. If a vendor is proudest of the badge and quietest about the traffic, believe the quiet part.

Because traffic is evidence that people and crawlers still use the site. DR can linger after the audience leaves. Expired-domain costumes buy the linger. A host with modest DR and honest category traffic will usually do more for you than a corpse with a pretty number. That is why QC starts with DataForSEO and a human look at the archive, not with a sort-by-DR spreadsheet.

Ahrefs and Semrush traffic estimates disagree. Use them as a smell test. Open the ranking URLs. If the only traffic is “write for us,” you found a slot shop. If the country mix is wrong for the language, you found a mislabelled geo. We report those estimates after placement so you can see the same class of number your team already uses. They are not clients. We do not print the logos as proof.

Outbound hygiene is the other half of “beats the badge.” A DR50 site that sold fifty dofollow commercials this month is a storefront. A DR30 site that links out like a magazine is a publication. How to vet a guest post site is the checklist. Do not skip it because the band is high.

Different crawls, different maths, different scores. A site can be DR40 and DA28 or the reverse. Neither is a Google metric. Google has said it uses links as a signal and that it fights link spam — including with SpamBrain — but it does not publish Domain Rating or Domain Authority. Buying “DA50 guest posts” from a vendor who also says “Google DA” is how you know they are confused or selling.

We do not sell against Moz DA. If your procurement sheet is DA-based, we will still talk in the Ahrefs bands on pricing because that is the public card. We will not invent a DA table to win the RFP. International guest posts start at $175 on the same DR bands with native writers. The metric does not change because the language does.

Your own site’s DR is a vanity number unless you are using it to sanity-check a vendor report. Raising DR is not a project we sell. Placing links to money pages is. If the only KPI in the brief is “get us to DR50,” we will ask which URLs those links are for. A DR project without destinations is how you buy homepage dumps.

A good host is one that will take the URL and still look like a site. The number is secondary. Casino and sportsbook use the iGaming table — English $180–$550, quote-only — because gambling-accepting publishers are a different pool, not because DR maths changes. A DR70 “gaming blog” that is a leftover coupon farm is still a farm.

New casinos should not chase DR70 in month one. That is a velocity problem dressed as a metric problem. Brand-first anchors, a slow ramp, and hosts that accepted gambling on purpose beat a badge chase. Adult, CBD, and crypto stay Enquire Now. Wikipedia does not run on DR at all. Digital PR does not either, and it has no public WWB dollar figure.

Niche edits are priced about 20% under the matching guest-post row — English from $99, quote-only — on the same DR bands. A DR70 insert on a dead page is still a dead page. The already-indexed URL has to have traffic and a sentence that belongs.

Order the class of host you can defend, not the biggest number you can afford. DR20+ at $125 is a fair test of process on a general English URL. DR40+ at $250 is the row most in-house teams already use. DR70+ at $450 is for when the host class is truly that scarce and still passes traffic and outbound. You can order those three bands in the portal on this page’s CTAs, or quote a mix.

Do not stack DR20s to “average up” to a DR40 brief. That is not how the graph works and it is not how we fulfil. Do not skip DR30+ at $175 just because it is not marked popular. Popular is an order-volume label. Fit is the job.

Founded 2022, Richmond Australia, teams in Singapore and the Philippines, 10,000+ placements, 15+ languages. We have placed across DR20 through DR70. That is not a reason to treat DR as Google. Open the live URL. If the badge is the only impressive thing on the page, you bought the wrong object — from anyone.

As one field next to the live URL, the traffic estimate, and the anchor — not as the grade. We report Ahrefs DR so you can see the band you paid for. Semrush figures can sit beside it. They will not match each other exactly. Neither is Google. If the live URL’s DR is in band and the page looks like a slot shop, the report did not fail the maths. The host failed vetting, and you should say so.

Do not average the DR column and call it the campaign. Ten DR20+ posts at $125 are ten young or modest hosts, not “200 DR.” One DR70+ at $450 is one scarce host, not a strategy. Mix bands because destinations need different classes, not because a slide wants a pretty mean. International reports use the same DR fields on the $175–$495 card. iGaming reports use the same fields on the $180–$550 card. The vertical does not invent a second metric.

If a client or a procurement sheet still speaks Moz DA, translate once and then work in the published Ahrefs bands. We will not reprint the report as DA to win an argument. The sibling page is domain rating vs domain authority. This page stays on what “good” means — and why the badge is never the whole answer.