Backlink
SEOAn inbound link from another website to yours. The count matters less than the number of distinct domains linking, their quality, and whether the links pass ranking signals.
SEO
Domain rating
A third-party score, usually 0 to 100, estimating the strength of a site’s backlink profile. Useful for rough comparison, and routinely oversold by directories as a product.
Also called DR, domain authority, DA
Domain rating is a logarithmic score produced by SEO tool vendors to estimate how strong a site’s backlink profile is relative to other sites. Different vendors compute it differently and call it different things, so a score is only comparable within one tool.
No search engine uses it. It is a third-party estimate of an input, not a ranking factor, and treating it as one leads to bad decisions.
Launch directories advertise it heavily. Our benchmark recorded ratings around 81 to 83 for Fazier, roughly 75 for Uneed, 72 to 73 for TinyLaunch, about 63 for MicroLaunch and 52 to 54 for LaunchingNext. Some market a “75 DR backlink” as the product itself.
Two cautions. A high domain rating tells you the site has strong links overall; it says nothing about whether your particular listing page is indexed, linked internally, or capable of passing anything. And a score can be inflated by exactly the low-quality link networks that make a domain risky to be associated with.
Use it as a rough tiebreaker between otherwise similar directories, well below relevance, whether the listing page is server rendered, and whether the link is dofollow without being bought.
Last reviewed .
See also
Referring domain
SEOA distinct website that links to yours at least once. Counted per domain rather than per link, which makes it a far better measure of a link profile than backlink count.
Link attributes that tell search engines whether to pass ranking signals to the destination. Dofollow is the default; nofollow asks engines not to count the link as an endorsement.
Launch directory
DirectoryA site where makers submit new products for review and publication, usually combining a dated feed of recent launches with permanent, browsable listing pages.