The impact of domain authority on SEO visibility

Some people may be surprised

In 2018 the Trump White House ripped off a piece of content from the SurveyMonkey blog and posted it on whitehouse.gov with all of the links intact. Without trying our SEO team got multiple inbound links from one of the most authoritative sites on the planet; however, the results might surprise some of you. 

Nothing happened at all.

We first measured results on the linked pages. No change. 

We measured results on the pages one and two degrees away. No change.

We implemented redirects from the linked pages to other weaker pages. No change.

We 404'ed the linked pages to see what the negatives might be. No change.

We noindexed the linked pages. No change.

Everything we tried didn't move any needles, and we learned an important lesson. 

Domain authority, page rank, site authority whatever you want to call it doesn't just provide magic SEO steroids in a vacuum. The value of any inbound link is a factor of all of its attributes: relevancy, authority both externally and internally, and most importantly the context of the linked page. The linked page could be classified for such competitive terms that single links have no marginal impact or the opposite could be true that it already has maximum visibility and links aren't needed. 

We can't say for certain that the links from the White House had no impact whatsoever on the overall visibility, but there was never anything we could detect. Those links from an SEO standpoint, if we had paid for them, would be ROI negative. 

From that point forward we demoted the focus on domain authority for inbound links. Instead we shifted our efforts to links that had visibility which is the same thing I recommend to ever site I have ever had the opportunity to advise.

When you focus on links with high domain authority you could potentially be acquiring links that have little to no impact in the algorithmic rankings of your site due to a lack of relevancy or low actual authority from that page. However if your primary metric is visibility - meaning eyeballs seeing that content - the link will be beneficial even if it has no weight within the search algorithms.

This visibility means that real humans and hopefully buyers will see that link. Even better influencers and journalists might see that link too, and it will spawn other links which may have search algorithm value. More importantly the link and awareness will be visible to other buyers.

To some this might sound like digital PR, but digital PR in many cases is just dressed up domain authority focused link building. I would recommend leaning even harder into PR and not even worrying about the link building aspect of the PR.

There are a couple PR agencies that I have been recommending for the last five years and I have seen firsthand their results generate business ROI both in search engine visibility and awareness. If I can make any introductions, please let me know!

If you are looking for a new role or hiring please add yourself or the role to my job board for free.