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Domain Rating (or DR) is a site authority metric created by Ahrefs, which is used to show the authority and ranking potential for a given site. It’s calculated based on a number of factors, including the number of referring dofollow links and the authority of those links. Domain Rating is measured on a scale of 0 to 100, with 0 representing the lowest possible authority, and 100 being the highest. Domain Rating generally shares a close relationship with Ahrefs Rank (AR), which is a more granular measure (out of millions) where a score closer to 0 is more authoritative. Domain rating can be useful when making informed SEO observations and decisions, such as your site’s ranking potential compared to its competitors, or prospecting the value of a backlink from a certain domain. DR is measured on a logarithmic scale, meaning that the gap between the DR values on the higher end of the scale are much wider than those on the lower end, and increasing your DR will become more challenging the higher it gets. For example, if you’re working to increase your DR from 25 to 26, you’re going to find it significantly easier than trying to increase it from 65 to 66. If you’re curious about your Ahrefs DR but don’t have access to the full version of Ahrefs, you can view it for free with Ahrefs’ online Website Authority Checker. While DR features prominently in many Ahrefs reports, and tends to have a strong correlation with a site’s traffic and rankings, it isn’t something that’s tracked by Google. By focussing on producing high quality content and building valuable backlinks, your rankings, traffic, and domain rating will improve as a natural by product.

Domain authority (DA) is a system of measuring how authoritative a website is, created by leading SEO tool Moz. Although similar to Page Authority, another measure provided by the software company, Domain Authority is a metric for the entire domain as opposed to the individual page. It’s based on a range of different factors using data drawn from Moz’s Link Explorer web index, including a site’s total number of links and root domains. Although DA is not a direct ranking factor, and isn’t tracked by Google, it remains a useful indicator for assessing both the ranking potential of your site, and the potential value of links from outside referring domains. Checking domain authority is a routine step when most SEOs begin working on a site. Moz maintains a free Free Domain Analysis Tool on their website, so even if you’re not paying for the full tool, you’ll be able to keep an eye on your site’s DA as you work to optimise it. Domain authority is scored on a scale from 0 to 100, with 100 being the highest. Authority scores average between 40 and 50, so anything above 50 can be considered good. The 60 mark is a tough barrier to break for most sites, so anything above 60 can be considered excellent! A minority of long-established and highly popular sites, for example Wikipedia, have DA scores in the 90s. Many link builders consider the domain authority of a website before reaching out for links, as gaining links from high authority websites is extremely beneficial. However, while domain authority is important, it is not the only important metric, and assessing the true value of a site will require a more granular look at a range of other authority factors.

Trust Flow (or TF) is a metric created and trademarked by the SEO tool Majestic. It’s a numeric score between 0 and 100 which indicates how trustworthy and authoritative a given website is, based on the authority of the referring domains it has in its backlink profile. It can be checked for free through the Majestic Backlink Checker. Like Ahrefs’ Domain Rating and Moz’s Domain Authority, this metric isn’t endorsed by Google, but does provide a useful indicator for the ranking potential of a site, and the value of a backlink from a referring domain. Unlike Majestic’s Citation Flow metric, which measures the quantity of links alone, improving Trust Flow is much more challenging. Because Trust Flow is a measure of the quality of links rather than the raw quantity, and new backlinks can cause the score to go up or down depending on the authority of the referring domain, the vast majority of websites tend to have a Citation Flow that’s higher than their Trust Flow. During any SEO work, your site’s Trust Flow score can be useful for getting a quick, at a glance idea of your site’s ranking potential, and sudden peaks or dips in the score can prompt you to identify and understand how changes in your backlink profile are affecting your organic visibility. This is especially true of one of Majestic's other features - the Link Graph. When all are used in conjunction for analysis, it can give you a good idea of your backlink profile’s overall quality. It could be estimated that the closer the ratio of the first two metrics, along with a score circa 1 on the Link Graph - the higher the average authority of the sites linking to yours. When carrying out a link building campaign, and looking for new referring domains to target, it can be helpful to use Trust Flow as a benchmark for quality. By filtering out domains with a Trust Flow score lower than that of your site, you’ll ensure that any new links you’re able to build will improve the Trust Flow of your site, and its authority.