I've been thinking about this a lot lately. in cold outreach, we tend to lean on domain authority like it's some kind of golden ticket. But the landscape has shifted. Take two scenarios: a niche site packed with topical articles, no backlink profile, yet tightly related to your service, versus a high-DR general portal with zero relevance to your offering. Which link actually moves the needle?
A colleague once pointed out that domain authority is a uni-integer - a single number trying to summarise a multi-dimensional thing. PageRank, by contrast, is an array of topics and authority scores. Sitewide relevance? That's a recent fabrication, not a real signal. What matters is the context of the linking page and the topical alignment. If that page has its own link profile strength, sure, that helps. but a link from a strongly relevant page with no backlinks might pass more topical authority than a random high-DR link from an unrelated domain.
from a cold email angle, I'd argue that relevance is the amplifier. you can have a high-authority domain linking to you, but if it's from a page about fishing and you sell SaaS, Google treats that signal as thin. The thread also mentioned that lack of traffic on the linking page limits authority flow - and that's something people overlook. a high-DR page with zero traffic? That's a ghost link.
So, in practice, I lean towards option A - the topical, related site - even if its DR is low. Build for context, not for a number. The macro trend is clear: Google cares increasingly about entity understanding and topical clusters. Domain authority is a relic from a simpler time.
