Ahref DR Question

Hello,

I was analyzing a few EMD websites that are outranking high authority websites. These EMDs are new and have low-quality backlinks (mostly spammy blog commenting links). But their Ahrefs DR is very high.

This is the DR of a small EMD:



And this is the DR of an authority website:



As you can see, having only a few backlinks the EMD have higher DR than the high authority website. Are they using some kind of indexer service to have high DR and achieve good ranking on Google?

The reason for ranking a low quality website can be:-
1 He is answering the query in proper way than any other authority website.
2 Low quality website may be focussed on a single topic as compared to authority website which may have covered a lot of topics but may not be covering anything in detail.

Also, Metrics like DA can be manipulated.

moonheart said:

Hello,

I was analyzing a few EMD websites that are outranking high authority websites. These EMDs are new and have low-quality backlinks (mostly spammy blog commenting links). But their Ahrefs DR is very high.

This is the DR of a small EMD:

View attachment 446061

And this is the DR of an authority website:

View attachment 446062

As you can see, having only a few backlinks the EMD have higher DR than the high authority website. Are they using some kind of indexer service to have high DR and achieve good ranking on Google?

Click to expand...

High DR does not mean high ranking. From your screenshot, it's clear the authority site ranks for way more keywords and attracts much more traffic than the higher DR EMD.

tarunbhardwaj said:

The reason for ranking a low quality website can be:-
1 He is answering the query in proper way than any other authority website.
2 Low quality website may be focussed on a single topic as compared to authority website which may have covered a lot of topics but may not be covering anything in detail.

Also, Metrics like DA can be manipulated.

Click to expand...

The niche is online gaming. Their game description content is pure AI-generated. In this niche, the primary content is playable game and the secondary content is text based description. All websites host the same game for a specific game name. High authority website have good UX, UI than that low quality EMD site.

Anyway, my primary question is how Ahrefs DR is calculated?

HenryObi said:

High DR does not mean high ranking. From your screenshot, it's clear the authority site ranks for way more keywords and attracts much more traffic than the higher DR EMD.

Click to expand...

That's correct. The EMD is only targeting a trending keyword group, and they are outranking high authority websites for those trending keywords.

moonheart said:

The niche is online gaming. Their game description content is pure AI-generated. In this niche, the primary content is playable game and the secondary content is text based description. All websites host the same game for a specific game name. High authority website have good UX, UI than that low quality EMD site.

Anyway, my primary question is how Ahrefs DR is calculated?

Click to expand...

The calculation is completely link based: https://ahrefs.com/blog/domain-rating/
So at least some of those 22.5k backlinks must be coming from domains with a relatively high DR value.

Sometimes you will see new exact match domains (EMDs) with high DR, even though their backlinks look low quality or spammy. This can happen if they get links from a small number of high DR sites that link out to many domains (link dilution is low).

They might also be using a redirect from an expired domain that already had DR. And since Ahrefs is not perfect at spotting link quality, even some spammy links can count.

As Steptoe pointed out, DR is based only on backlinks not how trustworthy or relevant the site actually is. So if a domain gets links from high DR sites, even if they are low effort like blog comments, its DR can still go up.

But that doesn’t mean Google will trust or rank it in the long run.