Topical Authority Is an Entity Problem, Not a Content Problem

Dixon Jones

Topical authority has become an excuse to publish more. The industry logic runs: cover a subject from every angle, hit the content quota, and Google will eventually decide you’re the expert. Dixon Jones spent a fair chunk of his career preaching something close to that himself, which is partly why he’s now willing to stand up and correct his own homework.

His argument is that this is the wrong model. Google isn’t tallying word count, it’s building a map of entities: what things a site actually covers, how those things relate to each other, and whether the site’s structure resembles the topic as it exists in the knowledge graph rather than as it exists in a content calendar. Two sites can publish the same volume on a subject and land in completely different places, because one has built entity coherence and the other has built a very tidy pile of blog posts.

Drawing on his work since “Entity SEO: Moving from Strings to Things”, Jones makes the case that topical authority is an entity coverage and disambiguation problem, not an editorial one, and shows what that looks like in practice: auditing entity gaps rather than content gaps, linking by entity relationship rather than keyword theme, and why the thinner site sometimes wins. Aimed at SEOs who’ve done the content volume play and are still wondering why the authority never showed up

Dixon Jones

CEO InLinks

Dixon Jones is co-founder and CEO of InLinks Optimization Ltd, the UK company behind InLinks, an entity-based SEO suite, and Waikay, an AI brand visibility platform. He is based in Bedfordshire, UK.

Before InLinks, Jones co-founded Majestic, the link intelligence and backlink analysis tool, and served as its Marketing Director for roughly a decade, a period in which the company won two Queen’s Awards for Enterprise. He has since become one of the more established voices in entity-based SEO: his book “Entity SEO: Moving from Strings to Things” set out the case for knowledge-graph thinking over keyword-centric optimisation, a distinction that has since become mainstream in the industry. He has also written “Power in the Modern World”.

His areas of expertise cover entity-based SEO, internal linking strategy, backlink and link intelligence analysis, topical authority, knowledge graphs, and NLP signals in search, alongside broader digital marketing strategy and conference speaking. He has received a Lifetime Achievement Award for services to search and is recognised as an award-winning SEO speaker.

Dixon’s experience spans both sides of the industry: From setting up an agency in 1999 to building link intelligence tools at Majestic and then building entity and semantic SEO tools at InLinks, giving him nearly three-decades of hands-on view of how search engines have moved from keyword matching towards entity and knowledge-graph based understanding, rather than a purely theoretical or commentator’s perspective on the shift.