Using backlinks to boost your Ahrefs and Moz Ranks

Ahrefs and Moz are two of the most respected companies in the search engine optimization space. While both companies use different formulas, they attempt to rank a website on numerous factors, which indicate the likelihood of ranking on Google.

  • Ahrefs uses Domain Rating (DR)
  • Moz uses Domain Authority (DA)

Multiple factors go into these rankings, but one of the most important is backlinks. If you want to boost your ranking on Ahrefs or Moz, you need the right mix of backlinks to do it.

Additionally, these same backlinks will help you increase your rankings in the search results – or they should.

Ahrefs admits in their guide that your primary focus should not be to increase just your domain rating score. However, you should be focusing on high-quality links that will help you improve your DR and rankings.

How DR is Calculated

Domain Rating is calculated based on the:

  • Total number of links to your site
  • DR of the sites linking to you
  • Total sites the referring domain links out to
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For example, if the linking domain links out to 5,000 sites and one links out to 500 sites and they both have the same DR score, the link from the site with 500 outbound links will be more powerful.

Ahrefs donors selection from the base
Ahrefs donors selection from the base

Increasing your DR is as simple as building more followed links, but focusing on high-quality links from authoritative sites is better. For example, a link from a DR 70 site is far more powerful than a dozen links from DR 1 – 5 sites.

Additionally, if you have links to similar pages on your site, you should interlink these like pages to boost the authority of some of the pages that you’re trying to improve.

How DA is Calculated

Moz also provides an insightful guide on how to improve their Domain Authority ranking. The company states that DA is, for the most part, your “link equity.” Just like with Ahrefs, they state that focusing on DA just to raise it shouldn’t be your primary goal.

Instead, you want to focus on real links that:

  • Improve your DA
  • Drive traffic to your site
MOZ domain authority
Moz Domain Authority (DA)

Here are a few of the tips directly from Moz on how to boost your DA rankings:

  1. Focus on high-authority link building because these links hold a lot of value and will help you improve your website’s trust and rankings.
  2. Avoid spammy links because DA takes bad links into account. This is such an important factor because Google certainly tries to discount bad links.
  3. Build links that are going to drive traffic, even if these links are from low DA sites.
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In all cases, naturally acquiring genuine, real links from sites with low DR or DA will provide value and help you become an authority. However, building high authority links from real sites can also help you boost your rankings faster.

Spam links should be avoided when link-building because they take away from resources that you could use to gain more impactful backlinks.

If you do the work and build valuable backlinks to your website, you’ll often find that your DR and DA will increase along with your rankings in the search results.