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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 over a week ago

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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