Most SEO advice is bad

“Awful.”

“Egregious.”

“Reprehensible.”

The first 3 words that came to mind as I scrolled past this tweet the other day.

I won’t share the tweet here directly, but here was the gist:

“We’ve been working with this client for a few years now.”

“Thankfully they didn’t drink the SEO guru topic authority. They have absolutely zero topical authority pages.”

“And the links that were built went straight to the homepage where all websites naturally get linked to the most".”

He tweeted an Ahrefs traffic screenshot that spanned from June 2022 to June 2024.

In that time, traffic had grown from slightly less than 1,000 visits/mo to slightly under 4,000 visits/mo.

A lot to unpack here.

Let me be clear, what I’m about to tell you is not an insult to this person — it’s simply a disagreement.

First, a 4x increase in 2 years is not that impressive at such a small scale.

Second, I’m so glad that I’m now officially an SEO guru because I talk about topical authority. I’m honored.

“I’d like to thank the Acad—”

Kidding.

Third, he is right that homepages generally are the most linked to pages on any given website.

However, this SEO advice is bad.

At least, without any context.

I have no idea which industry their client operates in — he doesn’t say.

But if it’s eCommerce, I stand by my take — it’s bad SEO advice.

Topical authority pages still work extremely well in eCommerce.

They prove to potential customers that you are competent in this field and they can trust you with their purchase.

They also drive a ton of middle and top of funnel traffic.

Onto the links.

Yes, homepage links are the most common type of backlinks.

They’re safe. They look natural.

But they take a long fucking time to work.

If you want to move the needle faster, branded backlinks directly to your collection pages work at hyperspeed comparatively.

And personally, I prefer to get results in a matter of months, not years.

And to tie the two together, once you actually write topical authority content, you have EVEN MORE pages to build backlinks to.

So in fact, this would look even more natural than all of your links hitting the homepage.

If you’re still not sold, fine.

Here’s even more context — the guy runs a link building agency.

It’s not at all shocking that he doesn’t like topical authority pages — he can’t make money off of them.

If people wise up and leverage topical authority, he makes less money.

Simple as that.

This tweet got 5,000+ views.

I really hope every single one of those people took his advice with full context.

Catch you on Monday.

Kai