July 12, 2026 · 7 min read

How Directory Backlinks Actually Affect Your Domain Rating

“Domain Rating” (DR) is a third-party metric — popularized by Ahrefs — that estimates the strength of a website’s backlink profile on a 0–100 logarithmic scale. It’s not a Google ranking factor itself, but it correlates strongly with one: the number and quality of sites linking back to you. Understanding how DR is built helps explain why directory submissions, done right, are still one of the most efficient ways to grow it.

Why DR is logarithmic

Moving from DR 0 to DR 20 takes a handful of decent backlinks. Moving from DR 60 to DR 70 can take dozens more, because the scale weighs new links against the total strength of your existing profile. This is exactly why sites with a low starting DR tend to see the most dramatic early jumps from a batch of directory submissions — every new high-authority link makes a proportionally bigger difference early on.

Dofollow vs. nofollow: what actually changes

A dofollow link tells search engines to pass link equity (“link juice”) to the target page — this is the link type that most directly influences DR and rankings. A nofollow link (marked with rel="nofollow") tells search engines not to pass that equity. That doesn’t make nofollow links worthless: they still diversify your backlink profile, can send real referral traffic, and contribute to a natural-looking link graph that a profile made entirely of dofollow links from directories can actually lack. A healthy mix of both is generally more resilient than an all-dofollow approach.

Why a diverse backlink profile matters more than a few big wins

It’s tempting to chase one high-profile mention and call it done. In practice, search engines look at the overall shape of your backlink profile: how many unique referring domains link to you, how topically relevant they are, and how naturally that profile grew over time. A hundred backlinks from a hundred different, relevant, moderately authoritative directories is typically a stronger and more durable signal than five backlinks from five extremely high-DR sites, because it looks like organic, widespread recognition rather than a single engineered event.

What doesn’t move DR

• Internal links between your own pages — DR is about external, third-party trust.
• Links from sites that have themselves been deindexed or heavily penalized.
• Reciprocal link exchanges at scale, which search engines are specifically tuned to discount.

A sensible way to think about targets

Rather than fixating on a specific DR number, track it as a lagging indicator. Submit to a broad, relevant set of high-authority directories, keep your on-page SEO fundamentals solid, and expect DR to move gradually over weeks and months as those links get crawled and indexed — not overnight. If you’re already above DR 20, don’t assume you’ve plateaued: sites with higher DR still benefit meaningfully from a diversified profile, even if the jumps are less dramatic than they were early on.