Too many backlinks???

Hi guys and gals. Was trawling through our AHREFs rankings today and have a question about our profile. We have 5.2K backlinks and 300 referring domains which scores us a DR of 23. However many of competitors have less backlinks and less referring domains but the sameish or higher DR score. I vaguely recall reading an article which said that you can have too many backlinks if you don't have enough referring domains, is this right? I know this can be subjective based on the quality of backlinks/domains but as a general rules are we perhaps being penalized for too many links?

Cheers.

You won't be able to tell if you're penalized by Google based on Ahrefs' metrics (check Search Console for that), but the ratio between the number of backlinks and referring domains is fine I'd say. Though DR 23 with 300 RD's looks a bit weak to me, I'd assume a lot of those backlinks are UR 10 or under? My sites usually hit DR 20 with 70-90 RD's, with the backlinks' UR's being 12-18. If your backlinks have weak UR's, try building some tier 2's on them and it will push your metrics & rankings for sure

Thanks for the response Martin. Yeah i checked the average and we're looking at about a 26.5~ average UR strength so it seemed a little strange. I did find 1.5K links that were from spammy sites though so these have been disavowed and hopefully should clean things up.