URL Rating (UR)

What is URL Rating (UR)?

URL Rating is Ahrefs' 0 to 100 score for one specific page rather than a whole website. Where Domain Rating asks how strong the domain is, UR asks how strong this page is, based on the links pointing at it.

The critical difference is that UR counts internal links as well as external ones. A page that dozens of your own pages link to will carry a higher UR than an orphaned page on the same domain, even though nothing external changed. That makes UR partly under your direct control, which is unusual among authority metrics and makes it far more actionable than DR.

Like every metric in this family, UR is an Ahrefs estimate rather than anything Google publishes or uses.

Why page level beats domain level

Google ranks pages, not websites. A site with a strong domain can still have a page that ranks nowhere, because nothing points at that page. This is the single most common reason a tool or landing page underperforms despite sitting on a healthy domain: it was published, linked once from a navigation menu, and then left alone.

Because internal links feed UR, improving it is often the cheapest ranking work available. You already own every page on your site. Pointing the relevant ones at the page you care about, with sensible anchor text, costs nothing and requires no outreach.

URL Rating in practice

You built a free tool page and it sits at position 70 for its target query. The domain is DR 31, which should be enough to compete for a low competition term, so the domain is not the problem.

Checking the page, you find its UR is 2. Nothing links to it except the footer. You then add contextual links from the twelve articles and glossary entries that genuinely relate to it, each using slightly different natural anchor text. Over the following weeks the UR climbs, the page gets recrawled more often, and it starts moving up. No new backlinks were earned. The authority was already on the domain; it simply was not being routed anywhere useful.

Rules of thumb

Before chasing external links for a page, check whether you have exhausted internal ones. Most sites have not. If a page has fewer than five internal links pointing at it, that is the first thing to fix.

Vary the anchor text and keep it natural. Three hundred pages linking with the identical phrase looks templated, and templated link patterns are discounted. Vary the surrounding context too: a link inside a relevant paragraph carries more weight than one in a repeated footer block.

Common mistakes

• Assuming a strong domain lifts every page. It helps, but a page with no links pointing at it is still a page with no links pointing at it.
• Counting boilerplate links as real. Sitewide navigation and footer links are heavily discounted. A contextual link inside body content is worth many of them.
• Orphaning your best work. Tools and long guides are often published and then never linked from anywhere relevant, which wastes the effort that went into them.
• Over-optimising anchors. Cramming the exact target keyword into every internal link is the fastest way to make natural linking look artificial.

Related concepts

UR and DR describe the same link graph at different zoom levels, and the flow between them is link equity: the value that moves through a link from one page to another. Whether a given link passes any equity at all depends on whether it is dofollow or nofollow. To find pages on your own site that are underlinked and underperforming, the SEO checker audits a page against eighteen on-page factors including its internal link count.