Case study
Crypto SEO Case Study: 2,100 Referring Domains, Domain Rating 28
This crypto SEO case study is published for one reason, and it is not the traffic. It is the pair of numbers at the top of the chart: 2,100 referring domains, and a domain rating of 28.
That is by far the largest link count of any engagement on this site, attached to close to the lowest authority score on it. Traffic still roughly tripled in six months, from about 9,000 organic visits a month to 27,000, on a technical and content rebuild. Both halves of that are worth reading, and the second half only makes sense once you have understood the first.
- $990
- Entry price, published in full
- 30 days
- Notice to leave. No lock-in
- 1pm to 6pm
- AEST, senior-led, contactable
- Organic traffic
- 27,000a month
- Keywords
- 19,600ranking
- Top three
- 553positions
- Referring domains
- 2,100
- Domain rating
- 28
- Traffic value
- $9,600a month
2,100 links that bought a domain rating of 28
Put the three engagements side by side and the problem is immediate.
| Engagement | Referring domains | Domain rating | Domains per rating point |
|---|---|---|---|
| Crypto trading platform | 2,100 | 28 | about 75 |
| Industrial manufacturer | 1,000 | 53 | about 19 |
| Car rental services | 241 | 21 | about 11 |
The industrial manufacturer got a domain rating of 53 from half as many linking sites. The car rental engagement got 21 from 241, roughly a ninth of the link count, for a rating only seven points lower.
Domain rating is a logarithmic scale, so climbing it does get harder as you go. That accounts for some of the gap. It does not account for a site collecting 2,100 linking domains and landing seven points above one with 241.
What that pattern usually indicates is a link profile made of volume rather than weight. Directory listings, scraper sites that republish content wholesale, aggregator pages, coin listing sites, low-traffic blogs and paid placements all count as a referring domain in Ahrefs. Almost none of them pass anything a search engine cares about, because almost nothing links to them either.
A link profile is judged on what links, not how many. Fifteen links from sites people actually read will move a small Australian business further than 1,500 from sites nobody visits, and the second option is the one that is easy to sell by the hundred. That is the whole argument on the link building page, and this chart is the clearest evidence for it in the portfolio.
Why a rebuild moved this fast
Six months is quick for a tripling. The engagement is described in the data as a technical and content rebuild, and rebuilds can move quickly for a reason that is slightly deflating: they are not building demand, they are removing an obstruction.
At a high level, work of that kind covers three things.
Making pages reachable
Crawlable templates, sensible internal linking, no dead ends, no important content locked behind scripts that never render.
Making pages countable
Indexation sorted out, duplicates consolidated, canonicals pointing where they should, parameter and pagination sprawl trimmed back.
Making pages match the query
Titles, headings and body content that answer what somebody actually typed, rather than describing the product in the company's own vocabulary.
None of that creates interest in a subject. It connects interest that already exists to a site that was already there, with links already pointed at it. When demand and links are both present and the plumbing is broken, fixing the plumbing shows up fast, which is what technical SEO is usually buying you.
Compare the parenting content site, which sat flat for about eighteen months before it moved. That site was not unblocking anything. It was building coverage from nothing, one topic at a time, in a category with no floor. Two years in it reached 95,300 visits a month, but almost none of that was available in month six.
So the honest reading of a six month tripling is that something was in the way. If nothing is in the way on your site, do not expect this curve.
The ratios say this result is thin
Three numbers, all from the same chart, all pointing the same direction.
553 top three positions out of 19,600 ranking keywords
That is about one in thirty five. The renovation engagement has 541 top three positions from 4,700 keywords, roughly one in nine. Same number of winners, a quarter of the keyword base. This site ranks for an enormous amount and wins very little of it, which means most of the 27,000 visits come from positions four to twenty, and positions four to twenty are exactly what a competitor takes from you.
$9,600 of traffic value against 27,000 visits
Divide it out and you get about 36 cents a visit. Ahrefs' traffic value is what those visits would cost to buy through Google Ads, not revenue, earnings or income, and that distinction holds everywhere on this site. At 36 cents, advertisers are not bidding much for these searches. The renovation site runs at about a dollar a visit on a third of the traffic. This is informational volume, not people ready to do something.
The category itself
Google treats money-related subjects as your-money-or-your-life, holds them to a higher bar on trust signals, and revisits them often. A search market attached to prices that swing hard also reshuffles its own demand from month to month in a way that plumbing searches never do.
Put those together and a six month tripling here is less durable than a six month tripling in a home services category. Same shape on the chart, different odds of still being there next year.
What this does not show
It does not show revenue, enquiries, sign-ups or anything the client earned. Nobody supplied those figures, so nothing here claims them.
The market is 59.4 per cent United States, with the United Kingdom and Germany behind it, on a custom ecommerce build. There was no Google Business Profile work, no map pack position, no suburb pages and no service area targeting, because none of that applies to a site like this. If you are a business whose customers search with a suburb name attached, this chart speaks to the technical and content half of your job and says nothing at all about the local half.
The client is not named. None of the clients in this portfolio are, because none of them agreed to be a public reference.
What this costs
An Australian site carrying an inherited link profile like this one usually starts on Growth at $1,990 a month, because auditing what is pointing at you and rebuilding the pages takes more hours than a single service area needs. A small business in one suburb is typically Local at $990. Authority at $3,490 is for larger sites with real competition on the head terms. Everything is on the SEO pricing page, with no lock-in and 30 days notice.
Do the sums on your own margin before you commit. Growth is $23,880 a year, so a business making $2,000 gross on an average job needs about twelve extra jobs across the year to clear it, and roughly one a month to break even. If you cannot see where those twelve come from, take the smaller tier.
Questions
Questions we get asked
Straight answers, including the uncomfortable ones. Anything else goes to the person who does the work.
Ask your own questionOur current provider reports referring domains going up every month. Is that good?
Ask what the domain rating did over the same period. On this site the link count went up and the authority did not follow, which is the tell. A rising domain count beside a flat rating usually means the links are coming from places that carry no weight.
Can we just remove the bad links?
Usually you do not need to. Google ignores most low quality links rather than penalising them, and disavow files are a smaller tool than people think. The useful move is to stop paying for more of them and put the budget into a handful of links that would be hard to get.
Is 27,000 visits a month a good result or not?
It is a real gain, and it is fragile. One keyword in thirty five sits in the top three and the traffic is worth about 36 cents a visit. Traffic that sits in positions four to twenty at low commercial value is the easiest kind to lose.
Would you take on a site in a volatile category?
Yes, with the caveat said out loud at the start: results in categories Google watches closely move both ways, and a six month gain is not a six month guarantee.
Why publish an engagement you are partly criticising?
Because the number that looks best on a slide, 2,100 referring domains, is the one that should worry you most. A portfolio that only shows flattering readings is a sales brochure.
Free, by hand, no obligation
Get a free check on your link profile and your money pages
Four fields: your website, your main competitor, the suburbs you service, and your email. Within two business days a senior person spends 30 to 45 minutes on it by hand and sends back three real findings, one you can action yourself without paying us anything, and one that needs proper work.
Where a site has a link profile like the one on this page, that is the first thing looked at, along with whatever is blocking the pages from being crawled and indexed properly. No automated PDF, no obligation, no sales call unless you ask.
- Turnaround
- Two business days
- Follow-up
- No sales call unless you ask
What clients say
In their own words
Upwork reviews, reproduced unedited apart from the spelling of Arbaz’s name.
Great service, great communicator, patient, kind, helpful, and knowledgeable. Arbaz delivered a solid report that listed all the issues we face with our site, and answered all our questions. Happy!
I hired Arbaz to build links for our company website. He did well in his job. He manually outreached the website administrators and got us do-follow high DR/DA backlinks from the real website with high organic traffic, as we demanded. We noticed a great increase in our website domain authority due to the links Arbaz built for our website. He delivered on his commitments and was a pleasure to communicate with. I am extremely pleased with the outcome and will certainly work with Arbaz again.
Thank you for the invaluable SEO keyword research support you've provided during our recent projects. In a short period, your expertise has made a noticeable impact on our strategy and outcomes. Your ability to quickly identify relevant keywords and analyze market trends has been particularly impressive, directly contributing to enhancing our content's reach and effectiveness. Thank you Arbaz!
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