Almost every link seller prices by domain rating, and so do we. It is a fair way to price as long as you know what the number is and what it is not.

Domain rating, or DR, is a score from 0 to 100 that Ahrefs assigns to a domain based on the quantity and quality of the domains linking to it. A site linked from many strong domains gets a high DR. A new site with no links gets a DR of 0.

Google does not use DR. It is an Ahrefs metric, and other tools have their own versions, such as Moz's domain authority. They are all estimates of the same thing: how much link equity a domain has accumulated.

Why a high DR can hide a worthless site

DR only looks at links pointing in. It does not look at whether anyone visits the site, whether the content is any good, or whether Google has stopped ranking it.

That leaves an opening. A link seller can buy an expired domain that once belonged to a real business, keep the old backlinks, and put a blog on it that publishes paid articles about anything. The DR stays in the forties or fifties for years. The traffic is close to zero, because Google has worked out what the site now is. Links from that site pass little or nothing, and enough of them can get a page flagged.

This is why DR alone is the most common trick in link selling. It is a real number, it is easy to check, and it is exactly the wrong number to check on its own.

Check traffic alongside DR every time

Organic traffic is the number that is hard to fake. If a site has a DR of 40 and 5,000 organic visitors a month, Google is sending people to it, which means Google trusts it. If the same site has 50 visitors a month, something is wrong, and no DR makes up for that.

The rule we use: every tier has a DR floor and a traffic floor, and a site has to clear both. A DR 40 site with 300 visitors does not qualify for our DR 40 tier. It does not qualify for any tier.

How to check DR and traffic yourself

Ahrefs has a free domain rating checker that returns DR and the number of linking domains for any site. For traffic you need Site Explorer or another tool's equivalent, and most offer a limited free tier. Enter the domain, look at organic traffic over the last twelve months, and check that the line is flat or rising. A cliff in the traffic chart usually means a Google update caught the site.

Why we price by DR anyway

Because it is the number you can check. If we priced by a private "quality score" you would have to take our word for it. Pricing by DR, with a traffic floor on every tier, means you can open any site we propose in a free tool and confirm it belongs in the tier you paid for. The tiers and prices are on the homepage.