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I think most SEO arguments exist because we overcomplicate what actually ranks pages
Posted by on January 8, 2026 at 6:05 pmI keep seeing debates around thin content, content quality, page speed, UX, helpful content updates, and honestly most of them feel like people arguing symptoms instead of the system underneath.
The biggest misunderstanding I see is this idea of authority as a single score. It isn’t. What actually exists is topical authority: basically an array of scores across topics. You don’t “have authority.” You have authority somewhere and not in a lot of other places.
A site can be strong in one topical cluster and completely irrelevant in another, even if it’s the same domain, same design, same content quality.
In a simplistic sense, yes, authority × relevance is what determines ranking. To dig a little deeper, it’s more about how much authority you have in a specific topical space, and how efficiently you apply it/mould it/shape it.
Think of topical authority like your reputation in a neighborhood. People trust you on things they’ve seen you do repeatedly. Step into a totally different role and that trust doesn’t automatically carry over. Google works the same way – trust is contextual, not global.
When authority is low, relevance becomes your main lever. That’s why on-page SEO still works. Putting the keyword in the slug, title, H1s, internal anchors – none of this is magic. You’re just reducing ambiguity. You’re telling Google very clearly: this page is about this thing – you're just maximizing the relevance part of relevance x authority formula.
This is also why I don’t really buy into “thin content” or “bad content” as real concepts. Content is text. Text is opinion. It’s not objectively good or bad. The web only allows a few meaningful interactions with text: people click it, they read it, they link to it, or they ignore it.
If a page gets organic traffic, holds rankings, and attracts links, it’s doing something right, even if it looks “thin” on the surface. I’ve seen location pages where only the city name changes rank for years and generate real inbound leads. I’ve also seen beautifully written, deeply researched content go nowhere. The difference usually isn’t quality. It’s whether the page fits into an existing topical authority graph.
UX and page speed matter, but again, not in the algorithmic sense people frame them in. Google isn’t demoting pages because they’re ugly or slow out of principle. Poor UX leads to pogo-sticking. Pogo-sticking hurts CTR and engagement. Those behavioral signals feed back into rankings.
A lot of SEO advice sounds contradictory because people are speaking about sites from completely different topical authority profiles. A site with deep topical authority can be sloppy with relevance and still rank. A site without it has to be precise. Some “thin” pages work because they sit inside strong topical clusters. Some “great” pages fail because they’re isolated and unsupported.
Once you start thinking in terms of topical authority as an array, most SEO confusion disappears. It’s not about chasing quality scores or avoiding thin content. It’s about building authority in specific, well selected topical spaces (especially if you are a new website), expanding outward methodically using internal links, and using relevance to extract the most ranking power from the authority you already have.
Curious how others here think about this, especially if you’ve watched so-called “low quality” pages consistently outperform “better” ones in real SERPs.
Btw these are just patterns I’ve noticed from sites I’ve worked on, and a lot of discussions I’ve read here over time. This mental model has explained more real-world outcomes for me than most of the popular narratives.
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1 Reply
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SEO is based 100% on empirical evidence.
Someone improved pagespeed, saw clicks go up, so it has to be pagespeed.
Someone else added a keyword to the title and saw the same end result, so it has to be the title keywords.
Repeat that with 250+ other signals, the signals will get crossed.
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Basically a guessing game 😭
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In addition – this authority becomes more important with the advent of AI Overviews and AI results in general.
Another thing I keep coming across is this argument about “quality”. People disavow “low quality links” so I ask – how do you know it’s low quality? People also dismiss AI generated content as low quality (AI slop) so again I ask the question – how do you know it’s considered low quality. Especially considering AI just mimics what has already been written.
Quality is a personal perspective. You may think an article I wrote is low quality and I may think it’s some of the best content out there. But most likely – the actual “quality” (if it can be measured) is somewhere in the middle.
Granted there are links and content you can probably safely assume ARE low quality – but in my time doing this I’ve found that “low quality” threshold to be very flexible and much of what we may consider to be low quality is perfectly acceptable to Google.
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>The biggest misunderstanding I see is this idea of authority as a single score. It isn’t. What actually exists is topical authority: basically an array of scores across topics. You don’t “have authority.” You have authority somewhere and not in a lot of other places.
yes
>I think most SEO arguments exist because we overcomplicate what actually ranks pages
Yes and the do-everything checklists are a real problem that perpetuate this?
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Once you start thinking in terms of topical authority as an array, most SEO confusion disappears
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Idk, while most of what you said seems true, there is a gap that doesn’t explain how forbes used their “authority” to rank for every topic under the sun until someone wrote a blog post about it and google read it. There are definitely sites out there with wide enough authority that google trusts them on almost any topic.
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Are we sure u/Legitimate-Salary108 is not u/WebLinkr in disguise?
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You’re also spot on about “thin content.” It’s often just a pejorative for “efficient.” If the user’s intent is a simple lookup, a 2,000-word essay is actually a *bad* result.
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