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Backlink Relevancy - Interesting Perspective

by 4morereferrals
7 replies
  • SEO
    • |
Another viewpoint from SEOMoz

Rand Fishkin discusses his experience with relevant vs. non relevant links

SEOmoz | Whiteboard Friday - Link Quality vs. Quantity

Read, and fire at will ...

My experiences align with his comments further down [ not the video ] - what say you?
#backlink #interesting #perspective #relevancy
  • Profile picture of the author Marhelper
    Originally Posted by 4morereferrals View Post

    Another viewpoint from SEOMoz

    Rand Fishkin discusses his experience with relevant vs. non relevant links

    SEOmoz | Whiteboard Friday - Link Quality vs. Quantity

    Read, and fire at will ...

    My experiences align with his comments further down [ not the video ] - what say you?
    I could not watch the video ... what was the finding?
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  • Profile picture of the author Tom Brite
    Well duh!

    It wasn't really that much about relevant vs non relevant apart from his reply to someones question in the comment section, however people take google to seriously and think its this whole amazing god who knows everything!

    It's just a machine who can answer yes or no to questions and put you intro groups for things... that's it!

    You just gotta take it back to basics and understand basic seo and then you have enough knowledge to get top rankings.

    Don't let seo over complicate itself for you!

    Tom Brite
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  • Profile picture of the author InternetMarketingIQ
    Quality over Quantity. I have sites I have not worked on in a couple of years ranking very high. Sites I have actively worked aggressively on to get the incoming links up and have not ranked as well.

    In my opinion there are "Ratio Filters" at play that are defining the incoming link structure. So chasing volume links may actually be hurting your ranking instead of helping.

    Spend time getting the high quality links. I believe Rand's analysis if spot on.
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    • Profile picture of the author dburk
      Hi 4morereferrals,

      It seemed to me that he was discussing "quality vs. quantity", not "relevant vs. irrelevant". He did mention relevance in one comment but did not go into a discussion about it.

      I have always been an advocate of quality over quantity, and I believe an irrelevant backlink has very insignificant benefit. Sure you can argue that any backlink can help, but if the discussion is about which helps more? I don't see anyone doing well with completely irrelevant backlinks.

      Rand seemed to be picking up on a backlink weighting factor that is often referred to as domain authority. In his video he pointed out that your backlink needed to be linked to closely (no more than 1 or 2 links away) from the home page to benefit. That fact seems to me to negate the theory of so called "domain authority" since plain ole' PageRank would have the identical effect.

      The simple theory that the higher the actual PR of a linking page, the more weight the backlink tends to provide, would account for his observations. That theory also assumes that you only benefit for the keywords that are relevant to the backlink.
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      • Profile picture of the author 4morereferrals
        I linked right to this comment - not the video ... topic of my thread was - relevancy.

        randfish

        October 2nd, 2009 at 8:47 am

        To be totally honest, I don't think the content relationship (relevancy) or matching subject matter has much of an impact in the algo right now. Off-topic links, so long as they're from powerful, trustworthy sources, seem to help just as much as those with topical matches.
        It may seem weird, but I know I'm far from the only SEO to have observed this phenomenon.




        Originally Posted by dburk View Post

        Hi 4morereferrals,

        It seemed to me that he was discussing "quality vs. quantity", not "relevant vs. irrelevant". He did mention relevance in one comment but did not go into a discussion about it.

        I have always been an advocate of quality over quantity, and I believe an irrelevant backlink has very insignificant benefit. Sure you can argue that any backlink can help, but if the discussion is about which helps more? I don't see anyone doing well with completely irrelevant backlinks.

        Rand seemed to be picking up on a backlink weighting factor that is often referred to as domain authority. In his video he pointed out that your backlink needed to be linked to closely (no more than 1 or 2 links away) from the home page to benefit. That fact seems to me to negate the theory of so called "domain authority" since plain ole' PageRank would have the identical effect.

        The simple theory that the higher the actual PR of a linking page, the more weight the backlink tends to provide, would account for his observations. That theory also assumes that you only benefit for the keywords that are relevant to the backlink.
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        • Profile picture of the author Tony Dean
          If you were Google wanting to serve up the most relevant pages for a users search term, what do you think would be the preferred pages to serve up? Relevant links from relevant sites with good content behind them i.e 450 word articles - or backlinks from irrelevant sites are the issue with Google I think.
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          • Profile picture of the author dburk
            Hi 4morereferrals,

            I'm sorry, I'm just not buying it. I don't believe he meant that you can build totally irrelevant links and gain any significant benefit.

            One of the most influential page elements is anchor text on outbound links. Without adding "relevant" keyword text to the linking page you get no benefit, at least none for your targeted keyword.

            Could you image what search results would look like if every SERP had the same top ranked web pages just because they have the most link juice. Fortunately we don't see that because those backlinks have to be relevant, else that don't count.

            Regardless of what you read into that comment, if you read Rands post and watched the video, he made it very clear that he understands that relevant backlinks are essential.
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