Should you swap links with them?
Paste your sites and the prospective partners. We pull Ahrefs DR, crawl each homepage, then score every pair against the rules you switch on — DR gap, domain age, outbound-link density, topic overlap, HTTPS and more. Optionally generate a swap plan with anchor texts.
How the evaluation works
DR gap
Ahrefs DR is logarithmic, so a 10-point gap is a big difference in link equity. Trading a link from a DR 40 site for one from a DR 15 site usually gives you far less than you give. The slider sets how much lower a partner may be before the pair is rejected; partners stronger than you are always welcome but get an info flag because they may decline.
Outbound links
A homepage with 100+ external links spreads its equity thin and often signals a link farm or paid-link directory. We count real external hrefs on the homepage and also check what share carry rel=nofollow, because a partner whose partner links are all nofollow gives you nothing.
Domain age
Very new domains are more likely to expire, pivot or get penalised. Age comes from the registry (RDAP) and the Wayback Machine, whichever is earlier.
Shared IP
Several prospective partners on one IP is a classic private link network footprint. It is a caution, not a rejection, because shared hosting also does this.
Topic overlap
This is whether the two sites cover related subjects — a coffee blog and a café directory score high; a coffee blog and an AI coding tool score low. Overlap is read from titles, keywords and homepage copy. You can switch the rule off if you only care about DR and hygiene.
FAQ
The official Ahrefs free Domain Rating endpoint, shared with our DR Checker. The free tier only exposes DR, not backlink counts or traffic.