On the current Web websites and domains become less and less referred to by Google.

The search engine just takes content from sites and republishes it on Google properties itself.

Thus topical authority of authors independent of the domains they write for will grow in importance.

That said you still need to prove that you are a topical authority by publishing or contributing on domains that have significant domain authority.

Thus the older site specific authority concept won't go away completely.

So it's as you suggest. The topical authority increasingly puts the emphasis on writers and humans in general.

Websites will be less important and thus domain authority will lose some of its impact yet they also contribute to the overall "score".

It's good news though. A site can get penalized or demoted quickly but blacklisting an author who publishes on numerous sites is harder IMHO.

I would've thought in the EEAT world we're working in, topical authority is the evolution of domain authority. Harder to scale and therefore intrinsically more valuable than DA, when you can get genuine experts or inject expertise into your content.

Hello. This is an interesting and complex question. I think domain authority has some relevance to the EEAT model, specifically to the evaluation of Site Authority. Topic authority is an idea that is implemented at the algorithm level to evaluate the author's authority and expertise in a particular topic. I can recommend a pretty good article on this. There are links to some Google patents in there.

IMO EEATT Is mostly just pagerank, and their machine learning model based on clicks.

Speculation, as Google has said there's no "topical authority" in the same way they say that "domain authority" is a metric of SEO tools. But let's consider the concepts of: 1) a person who is a credible authority on a certain topic 2) a site that has built credibility in a certain topic And lets further clarify that "topic" is a known and unique concept - an entity - and that in this case, we are isolating a specific topic, with the understanding that both the person and a website might have many topics, concepts, entities where they would be credible authorities... in this case let's look at a case where they are just authorities on one topic. Person authority: there is definitely imo some holdover from Google+ days (why wouldn't there be?) where trust is a component of EEAT, and trust is a component of content authority - but this may or may not be 'person' dependant. There's enough evidence to suggest Google is looking at entities/entities categories so there's not too far of a leap to say that a trusted credible resource writing an article within a category is likely to be trusted, cited, earn links from more sources to reinforce that trust factor. An association of person entities with other entities is likely to create topic graphs with a trust 'score' for more or most trusted sources. A topic vector that would encompass people, sites, etc as 'trusted experts. Site authority would - in my humble opinion - follow the same course... I have experienced the trust of an established domain creating aligned (with their authority topics) content that ranks well out of the gate... but although it would be easy to say that is a function of "domain authority" I'd say it seems more aligned with trust and credibility in that topic... so Google expects a site focused on "X" that has earned trust signals, traffic, clicks, and graph for that topic "X" to be trusted to create similar valuable (to users) content within that topic realm. So to answer your question... I believe authority contributions to EEAT come from the vectors from the topic graph and that sites/people are nodes in that graph. [Having defined entities as those nodes is definitely better, but not every concept has an associated entity.] I do think that a lot of signals are content-driven but a lot are also link (implied or actual) driven. Just me and my Monday stream-of-consciousness 😁 Cheers