Taking a Website from DR0 → DR55 FAST

25 Oct 2023 · 1 min

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1:29

A marketer bought a website with zero traffic, paid to boost its Domain Rating from 0 to 55 in two weeks, and watched organic traffic stay flat. He argues Domain Rating and similar scores are vanity metrics that don't predict real results.

Chapters

We took a website from a Domain Rating of 0 to a Domain Rating of 55 overnight, just to prove a point. That point being, it really doesn't matter. This all started a few weeks back when I was having a discussion with a T-shaped marketer who was bragging about their website's DR. My follow-up question on the numbers of their organic, non-branded traffic and conversions were less exciting. It also brought me back to a time many, many years ago when Break the Web, our agency, was fired from doing SEO for an e-commerce brand solely because the Moz domain authority didn't increase, even though organic was higher than ever. So I bought a new website on Flippa that had a bunch of pages and articles written, likely by AI, just for the sole purpose of proving this point. I then went to Fiverr, took a shot on one of the many, many gigs that were simply offering to increase a website's Domain Rating, and after 2 weeks, bam, the website is a DR 55. And the organic traffic? Nothing happened. Now, I doubt this DR will stay over time, but the point of all this is that these authority scores are really nothing but third-party vanity. They can help with a first look at a website, sure, but a higher authority score absolutely does not represent high amounts of organic traffic. So stop focusing on numbers that don't really matter. Rant over.