What is URL Rating (UR)?

What URL Rating measures

UR scores the link profile of one URL on a 100-point scale. The higher the number, the stronger the links pointing at that page. It’s a page-level metric: if you type a whole domain into Ahrefs, the UR you see belongs to the homepage alone, not to the site.

The scale is logarithmic. Ahrefs says it’s a lot easier for a page to go from UR 20 to UR 30 than from UR 70 to UR 80, so the same new link lifts a weak page far more than a strong one.

How Ahrefs calculates UR

Ahrefs built UR on the same basic principles as Google’s original PageRank:

• Links between pages count. Each page that links to yours passes some of its own rating along.
• Internal links count too. Links from your own pages add to UR, not only links from other sites.
• Nofollow links pass nothing. Ahrefs respects the nofollow attribute.
• There’s a damping factor, so a page passes on less rating than it receives.
• Link loops get cut. Two sites trading links back and forth to pump each other’s scores don’t get credit for it, and Ahrefs also drops some other links that would inflate UR artificially.

The HTTP and HTTPS versions of a URL share one rating, so moving to HTTPS doesn’t split it.

URL Rating vs Domain Rating

Both come from backlinks, but they compare different things. UR compares pages with pages. Domain Rating compares whole domains with domains, and each linking domain splits its rating across every domain it links to. Because the two aren’t on the same scale, a page can have a higher UR than its own site’s DR: one post with plenty of strong links can live on a small, young domain.

Ahrefs also says UR tracks Google rankings more closely than DR does. That fits how search works, since Google ranks pages, not domains.

Why one page can have two URs

To Ahrefs, /blog/ and /blog are two different URLs: the one with a trailing slash reads as a folder, the one without as a file. Each gets its own UR. If some links point at one version and some at the other, the page’s strength is split in two.

The fix is boring and effective: pick one version, redirect the other to it, and always link to the version you kept. The same goes for other duplicates, like a page that loads both with and without www.

How to raise a page’s UR

• Earn links to that page itself. A link to your homepage doesn’t lift a blog post’s UR much. Pages that are worth citing, like original data, a free tool or a clear explainer, collect links of their own.
• Link to it from your strongest pages. Because internal links count, a link from your homepage or a popular post passes rating along. The internal link opportunity finder suggests source pages and anchor text for this.
• Don’t nofollow your own links. A nofollow internal link passes no rating. The internal link counter flags nofollow use in a page’s HTML.
• Keep old links working. When you move or delete a page that has backlinks, redirect its old address to the closest live page instead of letting those links hit a 404.

What UR doesn’t tell you

UR only looks at links. It says nothing about whether a page answers the search, loads quickly, or matches what people want. A page with fewer links that nails the question can still outrank a stronger page that misses it. Use UR for two jobs: measuring your page’s link strength against the current top results for its search, and spotting which of your own pages have links worth passing on internally.

If you mostly care about your site’s overall number rather than single pages, SERP DR gives every domain a free public DR page, and its paid plan updates DR weekly and sends email notifications.