Honest answer, DA is a Moz metric not a google metric, google does not see “DA 80” anywhere in their algorithm. So a high DA link from an irrelevant site is mostly vanity, looks good in a backlink report and does very little for ranking. What actually moves the needle: 1) Topical relevance, a DA 30 link from a site in your exact niche beats a DA 80 link from a generic news aggregator most of the time. 2) Page-level authority not domain-level, a link from a page that itself ranks and gets traffic passes way more value than a link buried on a DA 90 site’s archive page no one visits. 3) Anchor text and surrounding context, google reads the paragraph the link sits in. 4) Whether the linking page is actually indexed and crawled regularly. The “high DA backlink” sellers exist because DA is easy to sell, hard to fake relevance and traffic. If you have to choose between 10 high DA links from random sites or 3 mid DA links from sites that actually rank in your niche, take the 3 every time. The relevance angle you mentioned is the right instinct, trust it.
