Backlinks score in your UI: five myths about DR numbers

Myth and reality, side by side

Myth	Reality
Our DR equals Ahrefs DR.	It does not. Ours is round(100 x log(ref_domains+1) / log(2 x 10^7)), our own metric.
A higher score means better rankings.	It is a size signal for link diversity. Google publishes nothing of the sort, and rankings depend on far more.
Going from 40 to 41 is a small step.	The scale is logarithmic, so late points need many more referring domains.
The score updates when a link is added.	The index refreshes about monthly, so it moves in steps.
One number can describe a domain.	DR counts referring domains only. It ignores quality, topic and anchor mix.

How much the formula really knows

The input is one number, referring domains. Nothing else. That makes the score cheap, explainable and reproducible, which are real virtues in a product.

Put the formula in your help centre. A user who can check that 2,000 referring domains give a score of 45 and 20,000 give a score of 59 stops suspecting a black box, and your support team stops guessing.

It also means a spam network with ten thousand throwaway domains can inflate the figure. We never claim otherwise, so pair the score with a look at the anchor and TLD mix before you draw a conclusion.

Careful naming helps. Call it 'AlfaLinks DR' or 'Link score' in your UI. Never 'Domain Authority', which is a Moz term.

A label scheme that stays honest

Thresholds are our suggestion for UI copy, not an industry standard.
Score	UI label	Colour	Copy under the badge
0-19	Very small footprint	Grey	Few sites link here yet
20-39	Growing	Blue	A modest base of referring domains
40-59	Established	Green	Wide enough that one lost link is noise
60-79	Large	Green	Thousands of referring domains
80-100	Very large	Dark green	Seen mostly on major publishers and platforms

Before the badge goes live

The tooltip states the formula and the data month.
The metric name differs from Ahrefs DR and Moz DA.
Competitor comparisons use the same index for both sides; compare takes up to 20 domains for 1 credit.
Nobody on the team writes 'improves rankings' in the release notes.
There is a text fallback when the API is unavailable.

Worked examples of the formula

Three rows from the formula, arithmetic, not named sites.

Take three rows. With 100 referring domains the score is round(100 x log(101) / log(20,000,000)), which is 27. With 1,000 it is 41, and with 100,000 it is 68. Each tenfold jump adds a similar number of points.

That shape explains most complaints. A site that doubles its referring domains from 1,000 to 2,000 gains only four points, from 41 to 45, so a user may feel nothing happened even though the work was real.

Tell users that. A one-line tooltip beats ten support answers, and the counter guide shows where it fits in the layout.

Comparing two domains fairly

Use one index for both sides. Always.

The compare action accepts up to 20 domains for 1 credit and returns them on the same scale, which avoids the classic mistake of setting an Ahrefs figure beside ours and calling the gap a finding.

Show the difference in referring domains next to the score. Seeing 3,200 against 410 tells the story more clearly than 56 against 38, and users can reason about the former without knowing the log scale.

A backlinks score in your UI: myths, reality and labels