Content vs Backlinks: Which Should You Fix First?
Fix the content first if your page doesn't answer the search better than what ranks now. Fix backlinks first if it does and you're stuck on page two behind stronger domains. Google says it uses both.
Content decides: whether your page deserves to rank for the query at all.
Links decide: how far up it gets against pages that answer just as well.
In 1,193 Google top 10s for link-building and SEO searches, the top non-forum result had a lower DR than the sites below it 41% of the time. But 54% of top results were on DR 70+ domains.
MentionAgent's own SERP records, 27 September to 10 October 2026, US results. Method at the end.
What Google says about each
On content, Google's SEO Starter Guide: "Creating content that people find compelling and useful will likely influence your website's presence in search results more than any of the other suggestions in this guide."
On links, its link best practices: "Google uses links as a signal when determining the relevancy of pages and to find new pages to crawl." The same Starter Guide adds: "While PageRank uses links and is one of the fundamental algorithms at Google, there's much more to Google Search than just links."
So neither replaces the other. The question is which one your page is short of.
What 1,193 search results show
MentionAgent keeps a record of every Google top 10 it pulls while researching keywords. We took the 1,193 US results pages for link-building and SEO searches in that record and looked up the Ahrefs Domain Rating (DR) of every site in them, leaving out forum, video and social posts.
| Position | Median DR |
|---|---|
| 1 | 72 |
| 2 | 72 |
| 3 | 69 |
| 4 | 69 |
| 5 | 65 |
| 6 | 67 |
| 7 | 64 |
| 8 | 65 |
| 9 | 63 |
| 10 | 64 |
Stronger domains do sit higher: the median drops from 72 at the top to 63 or 64 at the bottom of page one. That's the links side.
But the order is loose. In 474 of 1,164 searches (41%), the highest-placed non-forum result had a lower DR than the median of the sites ranked below it. In 180 (15%), it sat on a domain under DR 40. Something other than domain strength put those pages on top, and the page itself is a likely candidate.
DR measures links to a whole domain, not to one page and not its content. So this shows domain strength doesn't settle the order on its own. It can't show how much of the rest is content.
Forum threads fill the top 3
731 of the 1,193 results pages (61%) had a Reddit, Quora, YouTube, LinkedIn or similar post in the top 3. So the page above yours may be a discussion thread, not an article someone built links to. When that happens, read the thread: what it answers that your page doesn't is the gap to close.
Which to fix first
- Not on page one or two at all: start with the page. Compare it with the top 3 for the query. If they answer something yours doesn't, links won't close that gap.
- Positions 5 to 20, page as complete as the ones above: work on links to that page.
- A new site with almost no links: aim first at searches whose top 10 already includes domains near your DR, and build links to the pages that start to rank.
Once a page update is approved, teams writing in Google Docs still need a reliable way to move the revised content and SEO metadata into the CMS. A Google Docs to WordPress publishing workflow such as Tenwrite can handle that step before the team moves on to link acquisition.
For the link side, see how many backlinks you need and how long link building takes. If you want to try ranking on content alone first, SEO without link building covers what that can and can't do.
How to tell which one you lack
- Read the top 3 for your query. Note what each covers that your page doesn't. If the list is long, it's a content problem.
- Check their domains' strength. Paste the top 10 domains into our DR checker. If every page above you sits on a far stronger domain and your page covers the same ground, it's a links problem.
- Look for weak domains in the top 10. If some rank with a DR near yours, the query is winnable with the page you have, or with a better one.
When it's the links: get them from sites in your niche
MentionAgent finds blogs writing about your topic, scores them by Ahrefs DR, pitches each one your best page and handles the replies with you. From $99/mo.
Start Getting Mentioned On AutopilotMethod
- Searches: every US Google top 10 MentionAgent pulled through Serper between 27 September and 10 October 2026 for queries containing backlink, link building, links, SEO, outreach, guest post, domain authority or rating, nofollow, dofollow, citation, anchor text, disavow or spam score. The latest copy of each query was kept.
- DR: Ahrefs Domain Rating for each result's domain, from our cache of lookups. Results on Reddit, Quora, YouTube, LinkedIn, Medium and other forum, social or marketplace sites were left out of the DR figures.
- Kept: results pages with at least 6 non-forum results with a known DR: 1,193 of 1,621 queries. The "highest-placed" comparison uses the 1,164 where that result was in the top 3.
- Limits: these are searches in one field (link building and SEO), picked because we research them, not a random sample of Google.
Frequently asked questions
Are backlinks more important than content?
Neither wins on its own. In our 1,193 searches, top results skewed to strong domains, but 41% of the time the top site was weaker than those below it.
Can you rank with content and no backlinks?
Sometimes. In our sample, 15% of the top non-forum results were on domains under DR 40.
Are backlinks still relevant in 2026?
Google's link best practices page still says it "uses links as a signal when determining the relevancy of pages". And in our data, the median DR is higher at the top of page one than at the bottom.