Domain Rating explained: what directory links do for SEO

What Domain Rating measures

DR is Ahrefs' score for the strength of a whole site's backlinks compared with every other site in Ahrefs' database, from 0 to 100. Ahrefs describes the calculation roughly like this:

1. Find every site with at least one followed link to yours.
2. For each of those sites, count how many other sites it links to.
3. Pass on a share of each linking site's own DR: roughly its DR divided by the number of sites it links to.

The scale is logarithmic, so going from 70 to 71 takes far more than going from 20 to 21. Only the first link from a site counts, and a nofollow link counts for nothing. The score is relative: when other sites gain links, yours can drop without losing one.

The last step matters most when you weigh a directory. In Ahrefs' own example, a DR 10 site that links to three sites can move your DR more than a DR 80 site that links to a million. A directory with thousands of listings splits whatever it passes between all of them.

DR is Ahrefs' number, worked out from Ahrefs' crawl of the web. Ahrefs says it correlates with search traffic and still advises against working on it directly: Google ranks pages, so it points you at good content and good links to that content. Its help center adds that URL Rating, its score for a single page, tracks Google rankings better than DR does.

What changes with DR4 on 1 December

Ahrefs announced DR4 on 5 November 2026 and moves the Ahrefs interface to it on 1 December. The changes that move scores:

• Subdomains get their own score instead of their root domain's. In Ahrefs' table help.ahrefs.com goes from 91 to 75, and a site on a website builder's subdomain can fall to almost nothing: one notion.site example went from 92 to 0.
• Links count for more when they come from sites Ahrefs estimates to have organic search traffic. About half as many sites have a DR4 score as had a DR3 one, so fewer sites can move anyone else's.
• Domains Ahrefs labels as spam drop furthest. Those between DR3 30 and 70 lost a median of about 15 to 20 points, while non-spam domains stayed close to where they were.

Ahrefs says DR4 correlates more strongly than DR3 with Google ranking positions across all hosts and subdomains; for root domains alone, DR3's correlation is the stronger one. It also says a lower DR4 is no judgement on the quality of your content or your site.

If a directory sells you a listing on its DR, check the score it will have from December. Ahrefs' free Domain Rating API returns DR4 when you add version=dr4, and keeps DR3 for a short time after the switch. The key is free with a free Ahrefs account.

curl -s "https://api.ahrefs.com/v3/public/domain-rating-free?target=example.com&version=dr4" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $AHREFS_API_KEY"

What DR4 does to 30 directories

We read DR3 and DR4 for 30 directories and launch sites that founders list on, through Ahrefs' free API on 6 November 2026 (Domain Rating by Ahrefs). The biggest drops, DR3 to DR4:

• Smol Launch: 77 to 28.
• Neeed: 75 to 27.
• SaaSCity: 71 to 24.
• BetterLaunch: 69 to 24.
• Open Launch: 71 to 29.
• Findly.tools: 82 to 56.
• TinyLaunch: 74 to 52.

The large directories and review sites barely moved:

• Product Hunt, Capterra and Crunchbase: 91 to 91.
• G2: 91 to 92.
• SourceForge: 93 to 92.
• AlternativeTo and Indie Hackers: 82 to 81.

Several of the sites that fell furthest give a free listing in return for a badge on your site that links back to them. Google's spam policy lists excessive link exchanges among its examples of link spam. Ahrefs gives no reason for any single site's score, so this shows what DR4 says about these sites, not why.

Which links count, and which Google asks you to mark

A link with no rel attribute is a followed link: Google fetches and reads it with no qualification, and it is the only kind DR counts. Google gives three values for the rest:

• sponsored, for ads and paid placements.
• ugc, for links in comments, forum posts and other content your users write.
• nofollow, when neither of the others applies and you'd rather Google not associate your site with the page you link to.

Google's spam policy says buying and selling links for ads and sponsorship is a normal part of the web, as long as the links carry nofollow or sponsored. Buying or selling links for ranking purposes, money for links included, heads its list of link spam. A directory that sells a followed link as the thing you pay for is selling exactly that, whatever DR it shows.

What Google and Ahrefs say about directory links

Google's spam policy lists low-quality directory or bookmark site links among its examples of link spam, beside links made with automated programs or services. A package that submits your product to 100 directories at once is a service making links for you.

Ahrefs' help center says it isn't worth risking your site by submitting it to tons of free directories, and that a link from a business directory in your niche with real editorial control is probably fine. A 2023 post on Ahrefs' blog puts it more bluntly: bulk submission to low-quality directories hasn't worked for at least 15 years. The same post names Crunchbase as the kind of directory where a profile makes sense.

The post also notes that Google has long said it is very good at spotting spam links and discounting them, so most bulk links count for nothing. What you risk is paying for nothing, and Google's policy says a site that breaks it may rank lower or drop out of the results.

How to pick the few directories worth a listing

IndieHacked runs a Directory of its own, so hold it to the same tests as any other:

1. Relevance: it lists products like yours, and the people browsing it are the people you sell to.
2. A real review: someone reads each listing before it goes live, and some are turned down. That is the editorial control Ahrefs means.
3. Real visitors: it gets search traffic of its own and its listings get clicks. Ask the owner what a listing in your category gets in a month; an answer that is only a DR has no visitors in it.
4. A stated link type: it says whether your link is followed, nofollow or sponsored. A paid listing should be sponsored or nofollow.
5. DR last, and from 1 December the DR4 score, as a tie-breaker between directories that pass the tests above.

Every link from an IndieHacked listing to a product's site carries nofollow, on every plan, and the FAQ says why. What a listing gives you is the readers who click it.

What to do instead of 100 directories

• List where your buyers already look: the handful of directories, marketplaces and app stores for your category.
• Earn links by making something people cite: a free tool, numbers nobody else has, a write-up of how you built a hard part.
• Count each listing by what it sends. A month after it goes live, read the referrer report in your analytics and keep the listings that bring visitors.

Built your product as an indie founder? List it on IndieHacked: the team reviews every listing, and its page links to your site.