You may notice a big change in one of our third party metrics, Domain Rating (DR), as soon as today. The data provider Ahrefs has changed how this metric is calculated in a significant way. Going forward, the DR number for most sites will be much lower.
The blog post linked below explains the mechanics behind the DR calculations and the rationale Ahrefs has for changing it. We want to emphasize, though, that this is strictly a change to a third party metric. Domain Rating is totally independent of Google and has nothing to do with how Google ranks websites.
In fact, Ahrefs made the following statement in its notice:
“The sudden drop in DR that is about to happen has 0 connection with how your website ranks in Google. We’re just changing the way we calculate this metric. There’s nothing to worry about.”
Furthermore, we would like to assure you that nothing has drastically changed with your website or its offsite activity. Ahrefs simply made a decision to alter its formula. The baselines we have previously used to judge website authority when using this metric will need to be adjusted accordingly.
Please feel free to read the entire blog post.
Again, we want to point out that this change is only reorienting a third party metric, which Ahrefs provides in addition to number of Backlinks and number of Referring Domains based on its crawl of the web. Google does not consult this, or any Ahrefs data, in any way, and nothing has changed in Google’s process to either necessitate this change or as a result of this change.
Please let us know if you have any questions or need further clarification.