Case study: 10X Domain Rating growth in 30 days
Practical steps I've done to improve the domain rating drastically with limited budget
Hey everyone,
This is the first article in my newsletter/blog and I’ve decided to start sharp - with a real practical case study that I’ve indie-hacked half a year ago. It’s not the rocket science, but still a clear transformation on the way to improve my overall SEO rankings. And I’m about to disclose what I’ve done exactly and what was the result. Let’s go!
What is DR (Domain Rating)
Domain Rating is a metric invented and maintained by Ahrefs - SEO suite for digital marketers. It’s similar to Moz’s DA (Domain Authority), but calculated in a different way (how exactly nobody knows apart from the internal team). Basically these metrics are something that gives you an idea of how your domain is valued by search engines. It sits in the range from 0 to 100, and if you have 50+ you’re already in a very strong position normally.
If you want to track your domain’s rating, you can do it for free. I actually don’t use the paid plan of Ahrefs and only rely on free features for now. The Ahrefs’ dashboard is fortunately free. So you just need to register on the website and import your domain from Google Search Console (or manually). It’s quite handy and totally recommended.
Where did I stand
When it comes to my project, I ignored (actually tried but never approached it seriously) SEO for a long time and my domain’s rating was stable around 3 (yeah, that bad) for a couple of years. As an engineer I was always spending too much time on the product, and way too little effort allocating to the marketing aspects. But the last year I’ve decided to try again. To learn and apply some SEO techniques. And the decision was to start from boosting the domain rating.
Long story short: as you can see from the screenshot below - it surprised me in a good way. After I started applying my SEO work, the DR first went from 3 to 7, and then from 7 to 39 in one go. Quite crazy and very unexpectable! It looked like a pure magic. Since then it slightly degraded and settled at the level of 30, but this is still exactly 10X from the initial value.
In September Google Search has rolled out a big update and many domains lost rating. As you can see it affected my domain, but compare to some other domains I have, the impact here was limited and it’s pretty much flat since that time.
What did I do
I decided to primarily focus on building backlinks. After researching the ways of obtaining permanent backlinks, I’ve chosen two different tactics:
Buy backlinks on the marketplace
Buy expired niche domains with existing DR and build a network of small blogs linking to the main website.
I’ve decided to execute them in parallel.
1. Backlinks Marketplace
I know there are multiple marketplaces for this purpose. I’ve tried only this one so far - MeUp.com. It has quite a powerful search and lots of options to choose from. I targeted websites with DR 30+ and price below $100. In total I’ve purchased 4 backlinks (3 guest posts + 1 innerpage link) and spent around $300. In my case I had to pay extra for the sensitive niche (trading). So for you it might be slightly cheaper in general.
I’ve written guest posts myself and uploaded them on the platform after checkout. Within few days the articles were live.
2. Build network of microblogs
Since I’m a tech person, building a small SEO-performant blog is not a big deal. And I know the ways to build and host it for free. In your case you might want to consider some services like Bullet.so - I’m using this one for the main blog connected to our platform. It works pretty well. Anyway, there are plenty of blog hosting solutions, you can easily find one for your needs.
The most important factor here is not the blog itself, but rather the domain you host it on. There are so-called expired (deleted) domains, and I was interested in those ones. Deleted domains, that can be purchased for the regular price, but still have a history and domain rating attached to them.
To find such domains I used the combination of two tools:
ExpiredDomains.net - free service for searching deleted domains. Sign up for a free account and you can perform unlimited searches. I ended up searching domains that contain my niche keywords and sorting them by different metrics. To narrow down the results I applied a filter to only display deleted domains, the ones that were deletet recently, and only popular TLDs (.com, .net, .info).
Ahref Backlink Checker - it’s also a free tool from Ahrefs to check domain rating and backlinks. So whenever you see potentially good domain name available for purchase, put it in here and you’ll see what kind of backlinks it has already and what is its DR.
Be ready to spend some time before you find a decent domain name with good rating and qualitative backlinks. But it’s a fun activity, I kind of liked it. Still thinking if I should automate this process at some point, would be nice.
Ideally, to really crush this tactic, you want to also reproduce existing backlinks on those domains, so they don’t get lost. However, I’ve decided to not go that way and simply built fresh websites. I ended up building 5 websites on domains with DR in the range of 20-50. Unfortunately, after a couple of months their DR started degrading, and now only one domain still has DR of 18, others are less than 10. But I still have blogs running and updating occasionally. Let’s see how it will go.
Timeline and results
It was the second half of July 2025 when I decided to act. And as you can see on the screenshot the results showed up in around a month since I started.
In terms of traffic on the website, I didn’t see immediate increase or spike. So DR is not a magic pill and actually has nothing to do with Google rankings, but underlying mechanisms like backlinks are important. They definitely affect how Google ranks your website. The more backlinks you have the better. However its important to have links from domains that have higher DR than yours. Ideally 50+.
Alright, time to wrap it up. Actually, I could go deeper into details on each specific section, but then it’s going to be a too long read. Let’s continue in the comments. In case you have questions about some parts - let me know. I’ll be happy to answer in details.
Stay tuned for more stuff, and happy marketing!