Hot take: domain authority numbers are becoming meaningless for link building

I keep seeing people in here obsessing over DA 40+ thresholds like it's the holy grail of backlinks. Meanwhile I had a client last month who built 8 links from obscure industry blogs with DA under 30 and saw their organic traffic jump 22% in 6 weeks. On the flip side I wasted $500 on a guest post placement with a site that had DA 55 but their content was auto generated garbage and Google never even indexed the page. So which matters more the number or the actual traffic and relevance of the site? I'm leaning toward the latter based on my experience. Has anyone else noticed DA being a poor predictor of link value lately?

2 comments

2 Comments

adam_lewis22d ago

Traffic I could barely keep up with from a DA 15 site.

violamurray22d ago

Traffic and relevance beat a shiny DA number every single time.