Skullin Ahrefs Domain Rating Drop — Investigation

Overview

During the ^[1], Melissa flagged that Skullin's Ahrefs Domain Rating (DR) has dropped to 11 — a significant underperformance given that the client is paying for a service specifically intended to improve this metric. The issue was surfaced in the context of post-layoff task re-allocation, as the SEO work previously owned by Yesh is being redistributed to Account Managers.

Melissa noted she would not raise the issue directly with the client on the upcoming call until the team has investigated the root cause internally.

Issue Details

Key Questions to Investigate

• Why has DR dropped to 11 despite the paid link-building or SEO service being active?
• Is the paid service actually delivering backlinks, and are those backlinks being indexed?
• Have any toxic or low-quality backlinks been acquired that could be suppressing DR?
• Has there been any recent domain or site change (redirect, migration, penalty) that could explain the drop?
• Can the issue be escalated to the domain/link-building vendor ("domain guys") for explanation?

Action Items

• [ ] Melissa Cusumano — Investigate the Skullin Ahrefs DR drop before the next client call. Determine whether the paid service is underperforming and why.
• [ ] Melissa Cusumano — Consider escalating to the link-building vendor to ask what is happening with the paid service.
• [ ] Melissa / AM — Do not surface the DR issue to the client until an internal explanation is ready.

Context

"The href Skullin is looking really bad. The domain rating is down. I thought they paid for it, and it's like down to 11... So let me know if that's something we can kick to the domain guys and say, hey, what's going on there? Because again, they paid for it."
— Melissa Cusumano, Sprint Planning 2026-01-08

Related

• ^[2]
• ^[3]