Is Topical Authority the New Backlink?

Over the last year, SEO chatter has shifted hard from link building to “topical authority.”
It seems Google’s algorithms are rewarding sites that go deep into one subject, even if they have fewer backlinks.

I’ve personally seen smaller niche blogs outrank older, high-DA competitors just by publishing clusters of tightly related articles.

What’s everyone else seeing?
Are backlinks slowly losing weight against topic coverage, or are both still equally critical in 2025? WordPress ...