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Does a low DR mean that the website is spammy?
Does a low DR mean that the website is spammy?

Find out if you can determine if a site is spammy from its DR.

Si Quan Ong avatar
Written by Si Quan Ong
Updated today

Sometimes in your Referring Domains or Backlinks report, you might see that you have a link from a domain with a DR of 0 (or N/A or some small number): 

Does this mean that this site is spammy and you should consider disavowing it? 

The answer is: no

Domain Rating is a measure of the relative strength of a target website’s total referring domains. It is not a measure of a website’s legitimacy or likelihood of spam.  

You cannot rely on this metric alone to determine if a website is spammy or not. Plus, new legitimate websites that have yet to build links can also have a very low DR score, and that does not mean that they are spammy websites. 

The best way to check is still to do a manual analysis. You can follow this guide on how to determine if a link is spammy.

Please also refer to Google’s link spam documentation for what Google truly considers as a spammy website or backlink.

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