So the DR of my website was 16 for a long time. It rose to 17 a few times, but never stayed over 17 for more than 10 days. In the last 2 weeks it dropped to 13. I checked lost backlinks and there aren't any. I started doing guest posts a month ago and AS rose by 2 while DA stayed the same. Guest posts I did are not low quality spam posts and that shouldn't cause the DR drop. Has anyone had the same happened to them? My organic traffic is the same as it was. The only thing that keeps going down is DR, and I'm not sure why.
DR drop
- Thread starter Sudopajdo
- Start date
- Oct 28, 2020
- 11,663
- 14,635
I can think of only 2 scenarios in which this happens...
1) google have devalued some of your backlinks and this impacts the DR
2) Ahrefs themselves have tweaked / changed the way their DR is calculated, and this impacts your site's DR
- Apr 25, 2025
- 532
- 118
DR (Domain Rating) can fluctuate even without losing backlinks. It often happens when Ahrefs recalculates its index or updates the weight of referring domains. If your organic traffic and rankings are stable, there’s usually nothing to worry about. Keep focusing on consistent link quality and content — DR will balance out over time.
- Oct 28, 2020
- 11,663
- 14,635
fully agree, too many times people focus on 3rd party metrics that google doesn't give a shit about, instead of focusing on what all of these ultra-rich mega-corporations focus on: THE PEOPLE
Traffic is the lifeblood of all (online and offline) success, if you have enough of, and the right type of it, you will make money even if your site's DR is -100 lol
- Jan 28, 2008
- 488
- 101
DR drops often reflect Ahrefs’ index shifts, not your real authority. If traffic and rankings are stable, don’t sweat it, just keep earning diverse links and focus on trust signals Google actually values.
I'm not selling links or anything, I'm managing this website. It's just weird for me that DA and AS are rising while DR continues to drop, this never happened to me before. From my experience it was always easier to manipulate DR. I don't care about it too much, but it would be nice if it stopped going down.