What Is Domain Rating and How Do You Increase It Fast?
If you have spent any time researching SEO for your SaaS, you have probably seen Domain Rating mentioned alongside phrases like "build backlinks" and "increase authority." Most explanations assume you already know what it means. This one does not.
This guide covers what Domain Rating actually is, why it matters for a new SaaS, what moves it and what does not, and the fastest legitimate way to improve it without risking a penalty.
What Is Domain Rating?
Domain Rating (DR) is a score from 0 to 100 developed by Ahrefs that measures the strength of a website's backlink profile. The higher the number, the more authoritative your domain is considered to be relative to every other site on the internet.
The score is logarithmic, which means moving from DR 0 to DR 20 is much easier than moving from DR 60 to DR 70, even though both represent a 20-point increase. At the low end of the scale, a handful of quality backlinks can produce a significant jump. At the high end, thousands of new backlinks might produce only a fraction of a point.
Domain Rating is calculated based on two factors: how many unique domains link to your site, and how authoritative those linking domains are. A single backlink from Crunchbase (DR 91) contributes far more to your DR than 100 backlinks from low-quality sites with DR scores under 20.
Is Domain Rating the Same as Domain Authority?
No, but they measure similar things. Domain Authority (DA) is a metric created by Moz, while Domain Rating is created by Ahrefs. Both attempt to predict how well a domain will rank in search results based on its backlink profile.
Neither metric is used directly by Google. Google has its own internal PageRank algorithm that it does not publish publicly. However, DR and DA have proven to correlate reasonably well with actual rankings in practice, which is why SEO practitioners use them as proxy measures for domain strength.
For most practical purposes, when someone says "increase your domain authority," they mean the same thing as "increase your Domain Rating." The specific tool you use to check it determines which number you see.
Why Does Domain Rating Matter for a New SaaS?
For a brand new domain with DR 0, Google has no historical evidence to evaluate how trustworthy or relevant your site is. It starts from a position of neutral skepticism, waiting to see whether other credible sites consider your content worth referencing.
A low DR means that even well-written, properly optimised content may not rank for competitive keywords because Google has not yet decided to trust your domain. This is the frustrating early plateau that most new SaaS founders hit: you publish content, it gets indexed, but it sits at position 60 or 80 with no clicks.
Increasing your DR changes this. When credible platforms link to your domain, Google's trust in your site increases, and your pages begin ranking higher for the queries they target. A site that moves from DR 0 to DR 30 typically sees a meaningful improvement in rankings across all its pages, not just the ones that received the backlinks.
What Actually Moves Domain Rating
Not all backlinks are equal and understanding this distinction is the most important thing you can take away from this post.
Unique referring domains matter more than total backlinks. If one platform links to you 50 times and another platform links to you once, Ahrefs counts that as 1 referring domain each. Your DR is more influenced by the number of unique domains linking to you than by the raw count of backlinks. This is why getting listed on 100 different platforms produces a much bigger DR impact than getting 100 links from the same site.
The DR of the linking site determines how much link equity passes to you. A backlink from Product Hunt (DR 92) passes significantly more link equity than a backlink from a site with DR 15. This is the core reason why submitting to high-authority startup directories produces reliable DR increases for new domains, while submitting to low-quality directories produces almost nothing.
Dofollow links pass equity directly, nofollow and UGC links work differently. Most high-authority startup directories including Product Hunt and G2 use nofollow or UGC attributes on profile links. This does not mean they are worthless. Ahrefs still counts these links when calculating Domain Rating, and Google has acknowledged that nofollow links are treated as hints rather than hard rules, meaning some equity still flows through them. More importantly, the indirect effects are significant: listings on high-DR platforms drive crawl priority (Google crawls sites that high-authority platforms link to more frequently), generate real referral traffic, and establish your brand's presence on the exact platforms AI engines like ChatGPT reference for software recommendations. The DR improvements clients see from directory submissions are real and measurable, the mechanism is just more nuanced than a simple dofollow equation.
Link velocity affects how Google processes new backlinks. Gaining 200 backlinks in a single day triggers spam filters. Gaining 7 to 10 backlinks per day over several weeks looks natural and gets processed without issue. This is why manual directory submissions paced over 10 days produce cleaner results than any automated approach.
Real Results: What Domain Rating Increases Actually Look Like
Rather than theoretical numbers, here is what a real campaign produced.
planetcert.com, an IT certification practice test platform, came to us with a Domain Rating of 10. After manually submitting to 100+ high-authority directories over 10 days at a pace of 7 to 10 per day, their Domain Rating climbed from DR 10 to DR 35 within 30 days. The campaign produced 1,000+ backlinks from 328 unique referring domains.
The 328 unique referring domains is the number that actually drove the DR increase. Each of those domains independently told Google that a separate, credible source had chosen to reference planetcert.com, which compounded into a significant trust signal over 30 days.
You can read the full breakdown in the planetcert.com case study.
The Fastest Legitimate Way to Increase Domain Rating
For a new SaaS domain, manual directory submissions to high-authority platforms is consistently the fastest way to build meaningful DR without risking a penalty.
The platforms that produce the biggest DR impact are the ones with the highest Domain Ratings themselves: Product Hunt (DR 92), G2 (DR 91), Crunchbase (DR 91), Hacker News (DR 88), and IndieHackers (DR 81). A listing on each of these platforms creates a backlink from a high-DR domain to yours, and each unique referring domain adds to your backlink profile diversity. While most of these platforms use nofollow or UGC attributes, Ahrefs still counts them when calculating Domain Rating and Google treats them as hints rather than hard blocks, which is why directory submissions produce measurable DR increases in practice.
The full process for a 100-platform campaign looks like this: submit at 7 to 10 platforms per day over 10 days, write a unique product description for each platform (duplicate descriptions suppress indexation), complete every profile field including logo and screenshots, and track every submission in a live sheet so you can verify each backlink as it goes live.
For the specific platforms worth prioritising, see 25 high-DA platforms every indie founder must submit to. For a step-by-step breakdown of how to execute this safely, see directory submission backlinks: do they still work in 2026.
What Does Not Move Domain Rating (Despite Common Advice)
Several tactics get recommended for increasing DR that produce minimal or no actual impact, particularly for new domains.
Social media links do not move DR. Links from X, LinkedIn, Facebook, and similar platforms are almost universally nofollow, meaning no link equity passes to your domain. Social media is valuable for traffic and brand awareness but contributes nothing to your Domain Rating.
Internal links do not move DR. Linking between pages on your own site improves how Google crawls and understands your content, but it does not add new referring domains to your backlink profile. DR only responds to external links from other websites.
Press releases on wire services rarely move DR in any meaningful way. Most press release distribution services use nofollow links, and even those that do not tend to syndicate the same content across dozens of near-identical low-quality sites, which Google treats as a single source rather than dozens of independent references.
Guest posts on low-DR sites produce minimal DR impact. The equity passed by a guest post backlink from a DR 15 blog is negligible compared to a listing on a DR 80+ directory. If you are going to invest time in guest posting, targeting publications with DR 50 or above is the only tier worth the effort.
How to Check Your Domain Rating for Free
Several tools let you check DR without paying for a full Ahrefs subscription.
Ahrefs' free website authority checker at ahrefs.com/website-authority-checker gives you the DR of any domain instantly with no account required. This is the most accurate option since DR is Ahrefs' own metric.
Moz's Link Explorer shows Domain Authority rather than Domain Rating, but serves the same purpose for tracking your domain's growth over time.
WebsiteSEO.net and similar free tools provide DR estimates that are directionally accurate, though slightly less precise than pulling directly from Ahrefs.
Check your DR before starting any link building campaign and then again 30 days after completion. The before and after comparison is the clearest way to verify whether a campaign actually produced results.
How Long Does It Take for Domain Rating to Increase?
After a directory submission campaign, most sites see their DR begin to move within 2 to 4 weeks as directories approve listings and Google indexes the new backlinks. The full impact, with DR stabilised at the new level, typically takes 30 to 60 days from the start of the campaign.
The delay exists because Google does not update its trust signals instantly. It processes new backlinks gradually, verifying that the linking sites are legitimate and that the links look natural before crediting them to your domain.
Ahrefs updates its DR scores on a rolling basis as it recrawls the web. Even once Google has processed a backlink, it may take a few additional days for Ahrefs to reflect the change in its DR calculation.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a good Domain Rating for a new SaaS?
For a brand new domain, reaching DR 20 to 30 within the first 60 to 90 days gives you enough authority to start competing for low to medium competition keywords. DR 30 to 50 puts you in a strong position for most niche SaaS keywords. DR 50+ is competitive territory where you can start targeting broader commercial keywords.
Does Domain Rating directly affect Google rankings?
Not directly, since Google uses its own internal PageRank rather than Ahrefs' DR. However, the factors that increase DR (high-quality backlinks from authoritative domains) are the same factors that improve Google rankings. In practice, sites with higher DR tend to rank higher across the board.
How many backlinks do I need to go from DR 0 to DR 30?
Based on real campaign data, 70 to 100 backlinks from unique high-DR referring domains (DR 60+) typically produces a DR jump from 0 to 20 to 30 within 30 to 60 days. Quality of the linking domains matters more than raw quantity.
Can my Domain Rating drop?
Yes. DR can drop if referring domains remove their links to your site, if those domains themselves lose authority, or if Ahrefs updates its algorithm. A well-diversified backlink profile from many different high-quality sources is more stable than one heavily reliant on a small number of platforms.
Is Domain Rating the same across all tools?
No. Ahrefs DR, Moz DA, and Semrush Authority Score are all different calculations from different tools. They correlate loosely but will rarely show the same number for the same domain. Pick one tool and track your progress consistently within that tool rather than comparing numbers across different tools.
The Bottom Line
Domain Rating is a proxy measure for how much trust Google places in your domain based on who links to you. For a new SaaS, it is the single most important number to move in the first 90 days because it determines whether any of your other SEO work, content, meta tags, technical fixes, has a chance to rank.
The fastest legitimate way to move it is manual directory submissions to high-authority platforms, executed at a natural pace with unique content for each submission. One well-executed campaign of 70 to 100 platforms can move a new domain from DR 0 to DR 20 to 35 within 30 to 60 days, as the planetcert.com results demonstrate.
If you want to understand the full context of how DR fits into a broader SEO strategy, read our SaaS SEO strategy guide for solo founders. If you are ready to start building backlinks, view our directory submission plans.
