DA and Backlinks Were Never SEO's Newton's Laws

On my first day in SEO, I was taught two words: Domain Authority, Backlink.

Back then, you'd think these were close to Newton's laws of the SEO world.

The tools played along. Moz, Ahrefs, Semrush turned them into clean scores, curves, side-by-side comparisons. Looking at the dashboard, it was easy to feel a kind of reassurance: get my DA higher, build more backlinks, and rankings would follow.

The biggest problem with this logic isn't that it's wrong. It's that it lets you believe SEO is a "do A, get B" linear system.

But after working on enough projects that competed head-on with Tier 1 sites, I realized this logic doesn't even hold up mathematically.

Around then, I had a very clear feeling: the old explanation wasn't enough anymore.

Push the logic to its limit and it falls apart. If your boss asks how we outrank these giants, you can't say: we'll spend a hundred million dollars and build a billion backlinks, and once our link count beats theirs, the rankings will come.

That's not how it actually works.

What really pulls rankings apart isn't link count. It's a different layer of signals underneath: Topical Authority, Brand Search, Brand Mention, Brand Reputation, Site Focus, Originality.

I've seen ecommerce sites that barely build backlinks actively, and still outrank Amazon on certain keywords. It's not that they have no signals — it's that the signals aren't only in links. They have ongoing conversations on social, influencer partnerships, a steady stream of positive mentions, and real users who remember the brand, search for the brand, talk about the brand.

Backlinks haven't disappeared. They just can't be understood, today, as "one link = one unit of authority" anymore. What they really represent is whether your brand is being mentioned, trusted, searched, and remembered across the internet.

Interestingly, none of this is new.

When I first entered the industry in 2017, my mentor and current co-founder Jine was already saying something similar. Most mature Tier 1 teams probably stopped fixating on DA or link counts eight or nine years ago. They were already playing a higher-level game.

This is also why, when people today talk about GEO and AI Search, the most important factors are still these. The overlap between SEO and GEO is high to begin with. What both reward, fundamentally, isn't sites that are good at gaming metrics — it's sites that are genuinely trusted within a topic.

So when I look at DA or backlink counts now, I treat them as a reference panel, not as the answer. They help with execution, with reporting, with team alignment. But they were never the cause itself.

If I had to keep just one capability for doing SEO today — or for doing AI Search tomorrow — it would be critical thinking. Don't take any conclusion at face value. Question the source of every "industry truth." That includes official documentation.

What actually separates people isn't who memorizes the metrics better. It's who understands that metrics are projections, not answers.