DA vs DR: Which Website Metric Matters When Buying Backlinks?

Almost every guest post listing shows two numbers: DA and DR. Buyers often treat them like official Google scores. They are not. Understanding what they measure will save you from overpaying for weak websites.

What is Domain Authority (DA)?

Domain Authority is a score from 1 to 100 created by Moz. It predicts how likely a website is to rank, based mostly on the number and quality of websites linking to it.

What is Domain Rating (DR)?

Domain Rating is a score from 0 to 100 created by Ahrefs. It measures the strength of a website's backlink profile, based on how many unique websites link to it and how strong those websites are.

Why the two numbers differ

Moz and Ahrefs crawl the web separately and use different formulas. A site can have DA 45 and DR 30, or the other way round. Neither is wrong. They simply see different data.

How both scores get inflated

Because both scores are based on links, they can be pushed up with cheap, low quality links that do not reflect real trust. That is why a website can show DR 60 while getting almost no visitors from Google.

How to judge a website properly

1. Start with organic traffic. Real traffic means Google trusts the site today.
2. Compare authority with traffic. High DA or DR with tiny traffic is a red flag.
3. Check the spam score. A high spam score suggests a manipulated link profile.
4. Check relevance. A relevant site with modest numbers often beats an irrelevant site with big numbers.

A simple rule of thumb

Use DA and DR to shortlist, and traffic plus relevance to decide. On Veftor, every listing shows DA, DR, monthly traffic and spam score side by side, so you can compare them in seconds.