How I find low DR, high traffic sites

Sharing every method I use

Author

Ian H
May 07, 2024

I’ve had many people ask me how I find so many sites with high traffic and low DR (domain rating).

In today’s email, I’ll show you exactly how I do it.

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Two quick things before jumping in:

  1. In case you aren’t aware, DR means “domain rating” and is a measure used by Ahrefs to estimate a website’s authority or strength. Higher DR sites typically rank more easily. DA is a similar metric, but it’s used by Moz and means “domain authority”.

  2. For those who don’t know, high traffic, low DR (or DA) sites are useful to find for a couple reasons:

    • Discovering easy niche ideas - if you find a site with high traffic and low DR, that’s a good indication the niche the site operates in is easy/low competition.

    • Keyword research - the keywords bringing the site the most amount of traffic are likely farily high volume, yet easy to rank for.

Alright. Time for the good stuff. How I find low DR, high traffic sites:

Method #1: Ahrefs referring domain lists

You’ll need an Ahrefs account for this.

  1. Enter a large site in Ahrefs’ Site Explorer. I’ll use Quora for this example.

  2. Click the number under “Ref. domains”:

  1. Sort the list by traffic, and filter it by DR. I set the maximum DR to 5, but feel free to set it even lower, or higher. Many people consider DR 20 to be very low.

And voila! You now have a huge list of high traffic, low DR sites.

By the way, you can also set a traffic filter to only show sites above a minimum traffic number.

Also: most of the results will be garbage sites, so be careful what you click on. If you want to know what the site is about, click the chevron next to the domain, and then click either “Top pages” or “Organic keywords”. See below.

Method #2: Ad network site lists plus traffic and DA checkers (free)

This method is free, but a bit technical and extremely time consuming.

  1. Find the sellers.json file of an ad network, like Ezoic. Typically, you won’t be able to find the URL anywhere, so you’ll just have to guess. It’s usually the ad network’s domain name followed by /sellers.json. Such as https://ezoic.ai/sellers.json

  2. Copy the list (Ctrl+A, Ctrl+C), and paste it into a JSON to plain text converter, like this one.

  3. Copy the output and paste it into Excel.

  4. In Excel, convert it to a table (Insert tab, Table - table does not have headers).

  5. Sort the table A to Z.

  6. Delete all rows except for those starting with “domain”.

  7. Ctrl+F to open Find and Replace. Click the replace tab. In the “find what” field, enter “domain “ (include a space after domain, don’t include the quotation marks). Leave the “replace what” field blank. Click Replace All.

  8. Find a bulk website traffic checker. SERP Ninja’s works well and can handle several hundred domains at a time (though it takes several minutes to run). Enter your domains, and copy and paste the results back into Excel.

  9. Find a bulk DA checker. Here’s one that allows you to check up to 50 URLs at a time. Copy and paste the results into Excel. Note that DA checkers come and go, so this link might not work for long. If that’s the case, just find a different tool.

  10. Repeat steps 8 and 9 for the rest of the sites (or until you tire of it lol).

  11. In Excel, make sure the metrics align correctly with the domains. Sort the table by highest traffic. Filter it by DA under 20, or whatever number you consider low.

Done! You now have a list of sites with high traffic, and low DA - and you didn’t have to pay a dime.

If this method is too time consuming or difficult, then I highly recommend this next option:

Method #3: Site Stats Database (fastest, cleanest method)

When I built Site Stats Database, one of my goals was to make it super easy to find tons of high traffic, low DA sites.

Here’s what to do:

  1. On the Website Database, set the max DA filter to 20 (or whatever number you consider low).

  2. Set the minimum traffic to 5,000 (or just leave it blank, and sort by highest traffic).

There are 6,634 results with those filters applied!

That’s it! You now have a massive list of high traffic, low DA sites. And you won’t find the garbage like you do with Ahrefs. Plus, these aren’t only sites that are referring domains of a large site (like with the Ahrefs method).

Site Stats Database is also considerably cheaper than Ahrefs.

I’m bringing back the monthly plan today (likely just for a limited time). It’s $39/mo, and gives you full access to the website database and all features.

And there you have it. I actually only use method #1 and #3, but decided to throw in #2 for those who don’t have the means to get a paid tool.

Thanks for reading,

Ian

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