Domain Authority vs Domain Rating: Understanding The Differences

When you decide to launch a website, you need to design one first and then start looking at domain names. Once you shortlist a name, you need to look for an NZ domain hosting provider to store your site on a web server to make it accessible to people. 

While this makes your site live, the next big challenge is to get people to visit it. This is where search engines come in. They help people find sites based on their requirements. Search engines work on algorithms and rank websites on the search engine results pages (SERPs) based on certain parameters.

Site owners constantly work to boost their ranking on SERPs as it increases the site’s visibility and boosts its chances of getting more traffic. 

While there are many tools and metrics to help improve the search engine ranking, today, we will talk about Domain Authority and Domain Rating. 

We will discuss what they mean and highlight their differences to help you create a better strategy to improve your site’s SEO score.

What is Domain Authority?

This metric can help you assess the likelihood of your site ranking higher on SERPs. It is important to note that this is not a ranking criterion but a metric to help you assess the impact of your SEO efforts. 

Typically, sites with a higher domain authority, which includes domain name authority, tend to rank higher than those with a lower score. 

There are many tools to help you check domain authority and fine-tune your SEO effort for better impact.

What is Domain Rating?

Google prefers websites that add value to people using the search engine for answers and services. 

Hence, if your site can prove that it is valued by customers and other websites in your domain, it increases the chances of getting a higher SEO rank. 

Domain Rating is a metric that tells you the quality of your site’s backlink profile. This is an essential metric highlighting the site’s standing in the domain.

Differences between Domain Rating and Domain Authority

Here is a quick look at Domain Authority vs Domain Rating:

Feature	Domain Authority	Domain Rating
What is it?	The potential of a website to rank higher on SERPs based on a range of factors	The authority and strength of a website’s backlink profile
Usage in SEO	Helps assess the overall authority of a website in a particular domain and its chances of a good SEO rank	Helps analyze the competitive strength of specific pages or URLs on your site
Scope	This is a website-wide analysis	This is more granular as it evaluates the quality of backlinks to specific pages or URLs
Calculation Factors	MozRankMozTrustBacklinksDiversity of linking domainsQuality of contentSocial signals	Referring domainsBacklink qualityInternal linkingThe growth rate of backlinksNumber of new backlinksCrawl data (Ahref)

Conclusion

While there was a time when Google focused only on the quality and strength of backlinks to determine the rank of a website on SERPs, it has now evolved to include many other factors. 

Nonetheless, backlinks remain a crucial factor. A high Domain Authority score tells you the possibility of your site ranking higher on SERPs, and a high Domain Rating score tells you the strength of your site’s backlink profile. 

It is upon you to use these metrics to craft an SEO strategy that boosts the popularity of your site.