I have bought links, audited links, and disavowed links for two decades, and I can tell you the metric I trusted most in 2015 is the one I trust least today. Domain Authority was never a Google number. It was a third-party guess that the industry agreed to pretend was real.
The metrics we worshipped were always borrowed
DA, DR, Trust Flow, Citation Flow: every one of them is a model built by a tool company to approximate something Google has never published. We adopted them because they gave us a number to put in a sales deck and a threshold to reject a placement. That is convenient. It is not the same thing as accurate. When I had Bradley Benner on the Unscripted SEO podcast, he put the knife in exactly where it belongs.
It’s not some stupid third-party metric like DA or DR or trust flow or anything else that matters about whether a link is valuable or not. What matters is whether it’s relevant.
— Bradley Benner
Bradley spent months in 2021 running tests before he launched his off-page service, and he came out of it convinced the qualifier was always relevance and the metric was, at best, a secondary tiebreaker. Confirm a source is genuinely relevant to what it will link to first. Only then is it worth glancing at a DR score to break a tie between two equally relevant options. Reverse that order and you are buying numbers, not rankings.
Your job is building associations, not pushing numbers
The reframe that actually changed how I price and pitch link work is this: a language model now sits behind every search surface, so the work is about teaching those models which entities belong together. As Bradley put it, our job is no longer pushing metrics; it is creating associations, strengthening them, and forcing the models and algorithms to recognize them. Brand connects to product or service. Service connects to location. You earn rankings by getting your brand referenced in close proximity to the things it should be associated with, over and over, on sources that already carry that relevance.
That is why Bradley puts roughly 90 percent of his tier-one links into brand anchors and compound anchors: the brand name, or the brand plus a service, or the brand plus a service plus a location. He stacks three layers of relevance: the link sits in relevant content, on a site with relevant topical themes, whose own backlink profile is already relevant. The exact-match anchor stuffing that defined the spam era does nothing to strengthen an association. It just looks like manipulation to a model that reads links as navigation, not as PageRank to be hoarded.
The diversity test most audits skip
Here is where Ernesto Ortiz, who runs single-variable test domains, sharpened my thinking. He frames algorithm updates not as punishments but as the search engine turning the dials on which factors matter most this quarter.
Algorithm updates are just turning the dials on factor importance. If you go down, it’s because you’re incomplete.
— Ernesto Ortiz
Sit with that. If a core update tanked you, the update did not break your site. It exposed that your signal set was thin. You leaned on whatever was weighted heavily at the time, and when the weighting shifted you had nothing else underneath. A link profile built entirely from high-DR guest posts is exactly that kind of incomplete bet. It looks great in a tool and it is one dial-turn away from worthless. A profile built from relevant citations, branded mentions, press coverage, and contextual links survives the re-weighting because no single factor is carrying the whole thing. This is the same completeness logic I lay out in my piece on search fundamentals, and it is why I keep dragging clients back to it.
Relevance is cheaper to defend than vanity
There is a budget argument here that I love, because it makes the honest path the affordable one. When a brand mention inside relevant content satisfies the language model AND the link satisfies the old backlink graph, you stop paying twice. That is close to what changed my mind when Greg Digneo argued for flipping the SEO budget: spend where the work compounds across surfaces instead of feeding a single channel. Bradley is blunt that unstructured citations, especially press releases on high-authority properties, are the fastest current lever for AI search visibility, because they pair authority with the freshness signal the models reach for.
Ernesto adds the filter I now run every aggressive tactic through. Before you buy that block of links with the gorgeous metrics, ask the only question that matters: would you bet the future of your business on this tactic? Most legitimate businesses say no, and that no is correct. The same instinct shows up in the long-game perspective Grant Simmons brought after 30 years in search: the durable move and the metric-chasing shortcut are rarely the same move. If you would not stake the company on a link source, it does not belong in the company’s profile, no matter what number it carries.
What I actually do now
I qualify every placement on relevance first and use third-party metrics only to break ties. I aim for brand and compound anchors over exact match. I diversify the signal set so no single factor can sink the site on an update. And I treat citations and mentions as first-class link work, not an afterthought. If you want the tools I lean on for that, I keep them at SEO Arcade, and I dig into how small operators apply this without an enterprise budget over on the Unscripted Small Business podcast and with the entrepreneurs at the Digital Christian Collaborative here in Cookeville.
Twenty years in, almost every link metric I was handed has been retired, gamed, or quietly ignored by the algorithm. Relevance is the one that kept working through every update, because it was never a proxy. It was the thing itself.