Ahrefs DR major update

on most of my domainds dr dropped but it is just a guide. I do not believe in good correlation with google

tophi said:

I must admit your point is really logical but maybe we see only the tip of the iceberg ...or they made a huge mistake...

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Just check the prices of link in Forbes people are paying (if you can find to buy such link at all). The number of outbound links is important to look only for relatively small websites - if you have 3 pages PBN with 30 links at the homepage of course the linking power will be diminishing with each link. However when the links are natural and the number of links is relevant to the number of pages/posts (Forbes have like 1 million pages in the index, but just 170k out bound links) there is no problem at all. Its all about being natural and helpful for the users.

I must admit, i loved this metric to death but so far the update really sucks....... Let's see what comes...

bignose said:

I must admit, i loved this metric to death but so far the update really sucks....... Let's see what comes...

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My biggest problem with this update is that the usefulness of DR as filtering tool went to shit. Before I looked for domains with 35+ DR - just because in most of the cases lower DR means no good links worth mentioning. Now this very same domains have DR between 1 and 10 - dafuq? Need to find out what DR now means the domain is worth checking at all... 1+? 2+? 5+? Hm.

Iknowsomethings said:

Really? So Google is like "OK Forbes which is gigantic website with over 700k pages in the index, worthing gazillion of dollars think this website is good enough and interesting to its readers to put a link in the article. However since they have used their limit of 10k links already I will gave no value to this link" and then "Oh there is this 1 page shitty website with spinned content that have only 1 link - this is so good, totally real and natural" - boom first page.

Some common sense, please?

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You are comparing a news site to a spam site, really?

First of all Google does not SEE, nor feel, nor think. It's an algorithm that has to work for EVERYONE the same. It does not privilege sites because they are a brand. The algorithm works based on the links the source has. It makes perfect sense. Anyone can get a Forbes link, same as anyone can get Wikipedia links same as Medium links. These links are FREE. Anyone can get them, people pay extreme prices because they are idiots.
News websites link a shit tons of times to everyone who they write news for. A link from these websites is kind off worthless tbh. Same as link directories that link a shit tons of times.

A website on the other hand that has decent amount of links, that linked up to 4-5 sites only, is a shit tons of times powerful than a Forbes or a Wikipedia link.

My electrical contracting website went down in ur by like 39 points weeks back. My 51/52 DR changed to a 24 this morning.
My moz has been a 34 domain authority and a 45 page authority.

aadelmalik said:

You are comparing a news site to a spam site, really?

First of all Google does not SEE, nor feel, nor think. It's an algorithm that has to work for EVERYONE the same. It does not privilege sites because they are a brand. The algorithm works based on the links the source has. It makes perfect sense. Anyone can get a Forbes link, same as anyone can get Wikipedia links same as Medium links.
News websites link a shit tons of times to everyone who they write news for. A link from these websites is kind off worthless tbh.
People pay extreme prices because they are idiots.

A website on the other hand that has decent amount of links, that linked up to 5 sites only, is a shit tons of times powerful than a Forbes or a Wikipedia link.

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First of all - thank you! Your post made me literally to LoL.
Second, good that you find out that Google is machine and not a person, real eye opener, right?! Next time thought try to understand what other person means by his words.
Third, try to do some real life outreach. Then come and tell me how easy is to get a link from big newspaper, because you obviously have no clue at all. Comparing Medium (everyone can register account and post whatever shit they want with no follow link), Wikipedia (you don't need even an account to post whatever shit you want with no follow link, moderators barely manage to fight the spam) and Forbes is ridiculous.

I think that guys from Ahrefs want a piece of Moz cake, since DA can be easily faken with large blasts of GSA links. Today I received an offer to buy posts on DA 61, but after I checked other stats & indexed pages (was 20 hehe) I wouldn't pay 1$ for post on such site. Currently I manage over 20 real sites (businesses) and so far didn't noticed any major DR fluctuations (-3 to -5 in few cases, all holding good). I'm totally relying on Ahrefs, and guys from Moz should follow them if they want to keep credibility of their tools (which are not cheap at all).

Iknowsomethings said:

Of course the DR change and ranking are irrelevant. Google couldn't care less for any 3rd party metrics. However the problem is that we use this metrics to analyze and filter websites and domains. Now Ahrefs DR is borderline useless for this purpose. Hundreds of millions websites/domains have DR between 0 and 18. Thats a problem when you need to filter those who are decent.

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I just have talked with a ahrefs support person they have also no idea whats going on. I just asked them a simple question let me elaborate here.

First example: A website in health and beauty niche has 10k unique referring domains and 20m verified traffic by google analytics let me paste the attachment here.


Now ahrefs dropped its dr to under 50. Let me paste ahrefs matrics image here.

Second example: A website which offers WordPress theme development has ton of spam no follow backlinks from footer somewhat around 7k with little or no traffic attached image below.


And let's have a look to ahrefs metrics for this site:



Now please think about it does it really make sense to anybody. Means a site with good healthy link profile 9 - 10 years old getting millions of organic visitors per month has poor DR and UR according to ahrefs than a site with shitty spam link, no visitor at all. People who think that ahrefs is not stupid and there must be something good is just an illusion. I am not pointing to anybody over here in forum but it is really true. Ahrefs has a majority or users nowadays so they thought that they can create their own world, can create their own rules and people will follow. But things don't go through like this I am using ahrefs more than years. But now I need to think twice to renew my account with ahrefs.

What an update. Utterly rubbish. How did they even came up with this stupid idea? I talked to dozens of people and almost everyone is cancelling their subscription. This metric was good to filter domains and to see how strong is the backlink profile, now it became absolutely useless. Great job.

How about all the SEO agencies, which get calls by confused customers now? I guess this update could really backfire on ahrefs.

SInce that change I lost lots of rankings :/ .

darulez said:

SInce that change I lost lots of rankings :/ .

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inb4 the Google rankings were based on ahrefs DR

Mine dropped badly.

It’s a weird update.
3 domains dropped 55 to 45
And 2 domains dropped from 30 to 1

Yet all of them are simillar in stats and are all clean.

Ahrefs know their shit. They have the keys do a huge data set, far bigger than any of their competitors. While the DR update does not reflect a domains true quality, their crawlers & crawl frequency are the best in the industry.

Mikaelo said:

Ahrefs know their shit. They have the keys do a huge data set, far bigger than any of their competitors. While the DR update does not reflect a domains true quality, their crawlers & crawl frequency are the best in the industry.

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No one doubt their crawlers or their index, however their ability to use the data they have is what we question. And seems that they listen:

I hope they still display this version of DR after the new patch. I believe it provides a more accurate figure of the link juice coming into your site compared to the old one.

tshirtpromo said:

I hope they still display this version of DR after the new patch. I believe it provides a more accurate figure of the link juice coming into your site compared to the old one.

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The major problem (as they acknowledged) is that now there are like 100 millions websites with DR 0 and 1 - how are you going to evaluate them? Brand new website with no links have 0 DR same as website with say 10 decent backlinks? How is this proper evaluation? This change makes the DR useless metric for evaluating smaller websites / domains.

Why is it useless? You want to build a pbn or get a link from a website with no link juice/0 DR?

This new DR is more accurate. It will make it easier to estimate how much more link juice you need to get ranking above the competition. Also makes it easier to check out whether expired domains are suitable for pbns (which is what I use it for mostly).