Choosing what a domain dr number is allowed to answer
Domain DR is a count in disguise. Plain. It rises when more distinct sites link to a domain, and the log scale makes each new point harder than the last. Keep that sentence in the chart notes.
A good tile answers one trend question per domain set: are we closing on the three rivals, are partners growing, did a campaign move anything. A bad tile mixes in traffic or revenue and invites a causal story the data cannot carry.
Store the raw referring-domain count as well. If the score changes by a point, you can see whether that was 40 new domains or 4,000, and that tells you whether to worry.
Run costs, worked at three list sizes
Calculated from the credit prices above. Examples, not measurements.
Tracked domains
Calls per month
Credits
Dollars
50
1
1
$0.0001
500
1
1
$0.0001
5,000
3
3
$0.0003
When the run fails
A 401 means a missing or wrong key. A 402 means the credit has run out, so top up with USDT from the account page. Alert on any response where ok is not true, rather than writing zeros into the chart.
Guardrails worth adding on day one
Keep a second table of pulls that failed. A row with the HTTP status, the time and the response body beats a silent gap in the chart. Alert on anything but ok true.
Pin the domain list in version control. Short diffs help. When someone adds a rival, the diff shows who added it and when, and the chart gets a note. Otherwise the line for that rival appears from nowhere and people ask why it started in March.
Plan for the change of source, too. If you later add Ahrefs or Moz numbers, give them their own source value in the table, as discussed when we compared Ahrefs and Majestic.
A note on rate and rhythm
Nothing here needs speed. A monthly run is a handful of requests, even for large lists, and each response arrives as one JSON document. If your scheduler retries on failure, make the retry idempotent, which the primary key on domain and pull date already gives you.
Resist the urge to run the job daily just because it is cheap. Don't. Our index refreshes roughly once a month. Daily pulls return the same rows for weeks, and your chart fills with flat lines that look like stability but only reflect the crawl calendar. Read the Majestic alternative recipes for other pulls worth scheduling, such as anchors and intersections.