Domain Authority is Dead and Back Links Don't Matter

“I agreed with a lot of what you had to say about Pillar-Based Marketing and organic content, but not everything,” the man said to me as he sat down at our table. “I disagree that back links don’t matter; I’ve invested a lot in them and they show good results.”

“I’m not saying they can’t accomplish your goal,” I said and took a swig of my beer. I gulped it down quick to add, “I’m just saying they aren’t necessary to accomplish your goal.”

In the crowded pinball bar in Cleveland, I watched this man, whose name I don’t remember, think it over to a chorus of clicks and dings. 

“I just don’t think it’s enough to write the right content. You’ve got to prove your authority somehow, and back links do that.”

“Sure. But if you can just write the right content and jump to page one for dozens of terms in a matter of a few days… Why wouldn’t you focus on that and forget about any investment in back links? That’s what I’ve done, and I’ve got results that nobody else has. The numbers don’t lie.”

We quickly moved on to a group conversation with the rest of my colleagues from DemandJump about the day’s events at Content Marketing World, but the conversation stuck with me for months, all the way to today.

“I disagree that back links don’t matter.” 

By this point, I’d seen dozens of domains with virtually no domain authority simply dominate keywords related to their chosen Pillar Topics. I myself had designed a few dozen Pillar strategies that were able to drive hundreds of page one rankings and all the traffic that comes with them, and had never once thought about farming back links. In fact, I hadn’t thought about domain authority a single time.

First, the quick and dirty definition of domain authority provided by Moz: 

“Domain Authority (DA) is a search engine ranking score developed by Moz that predicts how likely a website is to rank in search engine result pages (SERPs).”

What this definition doesn’t touch on is the key metric driving domain authority: back links. The number of back links that exist to a domain, with special weight given to traditional, “dofollow” links, are what determine that domain’s authority. To hear hardened SEOs like the gentleman at the bar in Cleveland tell it, those signals are a precursor to any domain’s rankability.

You want to publish some organic content that ranks well and drives actual traffic to your site? Work on improving your domain authority. That sort of thing.

I won’t get into the long history of search engines combatting the careless exploitation of link farming as a practice, or the horrible consequences of leaning too much on the tactic, but suffice to say that even white hat SEOs who have left behind the nonsense that happened before Panda tainted everybody’s punch will pride themselves by saying that “there’s a right way to build links through strategic partnerships” and blah, blah, blah.

The whole thing translated to this widely accepted reality in SEO: Back links are a key ingredient in your SEO strategy. They just are. If you’re not paying attention to them, you’re being lazy, and you’re not competing as well as you should.

So, put yourself in my shoes. I see cases like this one literally every day:

There are 894 relevant, connected keywords within the Pillar Topic network for life settlements. Doesn’t matter what a life settlement is. Google it if you’re curious. What does matter, though, is that the domain at the top of this chart, lsa-llc.com, is on page one for about 225 of those 894 terms.

Compare that to their next best competitor, harborlifesettlements.com, which shows up for a little more than 175. 

Here’s the kicker:

Not only is harborlifesettlements.com obliterating lsa-llc.com in domain authority, but every domain in that rankings chart has a higher authority score than lsa-llc.com. 

I know from experience working with this particular domain that lsa-llc.com has not invested a dime into link building activity. As a result, they have a lot fewer links than their competitors, and that’s all that really matters for domain authority.

So, though domain authority purports to be a predictor for a domain’s ability to rank in organic search results, in reality it is no such thing.

If this was the only case from the annals of Pillar-Based Marketing where this was the case, it would be a neat little fluke. But it’s not a fluke. DemandJump’s domain authority is far below competitors like SEMrush, yet our charts look the same for the Pillar Topic networks we’ve focused on. 

I can pull up many, many more examples of this exact scenario for PBM practitioners in a wide variety of industries. Every time, the PBM domains have a lower domain authority than their competitors, but they clean up when it comes to top rankings and organic traffic.

I believe the reason for this is that PBM practitioners have embraced a critical concept: 

Pillar authority matters far more than domain authority.

When I say “Pillar authority,” I do so because I’m a brand-conscious marketer at the end of the day, but you could easily swap that designation out for “topical authority.”

Where SEOs who are stuck in the link building mud embrace a top-down, overly broad approach to proving a domain’s authority, PBM allows for marketers to understand what topics they need to cover in their site’s content in order to reflect the real-world search behavior surrounding their Pillar Topics. Rather than wasting resources on generic tactics that take a lot of time and money and, ultimately, aim to work on a domain level, PBM empowers marketers to know exactly what to write in order to prove genuine authority on a given topic to search engines.

That network of content a PBM practitioner builds is based not on a biased keyword list chosen for each term’s search volume, or competition, or intent, or difficulty. It’s based instead on a completely different understanding of search behavior, seeking to find patterns in large-scale search behavior that indicate which terms show up in the greatest percentage of unique buying journeys. 

The network of content that results is itself an asset that, as a whole, can be clearly understood by search engines as true to the experience those search engines know their users are already having as they seek to learn about a given topic. It is that entire network that establishes a domain’s authority on a topic, not any one article within it.

The results we’ve been seeing for domains that apply PBM methodology show that when SEOs can embrace this mindset shift, they can publish a nominal amount of content around their Pillar Topics—as little as 16 networked pages—and see dozens to hundreds to even thousands of page one rankings starting in as little as just four or five days.

Take it from me: When you get used to that kind of velocity and the rewards it brings in terms of organic traffic and qualified leads, you don’t have a minute to waste on crap like building back links. There’s no reason to do it, whether you “agree” with my take on back links or not.

Instead, what you find yourself doing is actually listening. You listen to the market, you understand the conversations they are having around Pillar Topics, and you provide value. 

That is the kind of marketing I want to engage in, and that is the kind of marketing I want to encounter whenever I’m searching for a solution.

That is Pillar-Based Marketing.