People also ask
In practice
The filter logic: DR is free to check and correlates loosely with site substance, so a floor at 40 removes the long tail of empty, expired and decayed domains before expensive human attention begins — seconds of triage protecting hours of review.
The “not the verdict” clause is the part that carries the quality: above the floor, the number stops meaning anything — a DR 45 shell with no audience and a DR 42 niche publication with a devoted readership are indistinguishable by the metric and opposites in value — so every site that passes goes through the full checks: traffic verified against the site (2,000+ monthly organic visits in this programme’s floor), topical relevance read at page level, the editorial-bar screen, the link-farm pattern test.
Why the floor isn’t higher: the metric is gameable and sparse at the top — a programme that demands DR 60+ buys a smaller, pricier publisher set whose metrics may still be hollow, while excluding genuinely valuable specialist publications that sit at 45 because they’re young or niche. Why it isn’t lower: below 40 the population skews hard toward sites with neither equity nor audience, and the human cost of finding the exceptions outweighs the filter’s savings.
The buyer’s translation: when a vendor quotes “DR 40+”, the informative question is what happens next — because the filter is the entry ticket, and the qualification behind it is the product.
See also: Domain Rating, Quality signals: DR, traffic, relevance, content, Traffic quality of publishers.
Checklist: Site Qualification.
Related service: Link insertions.
