People link to interesting news stories, or funny pictures of cats saying something stupid, from a million unrelated sites. I don't see how this hurts them?

<sigh>

Haven't we gone over this ground before here, several times?

that **** berry article shows true dedication... and lot's n' lot's of backlinks to copy.

sigh...i slowly don't know what think and believe anymore. I think i just need to test and happily leave links and then see results for myself.

Point is..google/cutts "warns" how bad it is ....but then people get #1 rankings with thousands of unrelated links. Maybe its really as simple as that quality links and unrelated links are equal, except that you need more of the unrelated ones to compensate for the lower quality.

They say not to do it but it's been pretty well established that it works.

Does it take more to make up for the lack of relevance, it's hard to say. Perhaps backlinks from relevant sites do pack more punch, the problems is, as you stated above... it's hard to find enough relevant backlinks.

Worst case scenario is those types of links could be devalued at some point in the future but I don't think they will ever damage a site... this would lead to being able to sabotage other sites by running an automation spamming tool on them.

Find out your competitor backlinks with the anchor you are targeting, offer them money for a link on their site, try and duplicate as much as possible your competitors backlink. If you can't get the same backlink or receive no response, find a alternative backlink similar to the one you can't get.

This also depends on how competitive the market is.

For first impressions, try and get niche related backlinks( at least that's what I do), then go out and get as many as you can. Have you checked their backlink profile in backlinkwatch or site explorer? Try and get links from the same sites if their related.Then, after you've got some decent niche related backlinks, go all out.

Try to create quality back link.

[DELETED]

George-

To echo the comments of others, you need to stop getting hung up on the whole relevancy thing. As example after example shows, relevancy is highly overrated.

I agree on relevancy, although nice, it is far from necessary. Build links from high PR pages of websites and watch your SERPS climb, it really isn't a difficult formula to be honest.

Indeed, many months ago I start with only Angela's links from non-related sites and got ranked for my keywords just fine. Tougher keywords require better links in my opinion, but you still need a ton of links, so unrelated ones work out nicely and easily.

You're making it too hard if you think all your links need to be related. Way, way too hard.

this is why I add in a paragraph of text with my backlinks.

I have no idea what benefit relevancy has but I'm trying to swing everything in my favor the best I can. If I can skew a page to have some relevance to the site I'm linking too then it's worth the effort.

It doesn't take much extra effort to copy n' past a pre-written paragraph that includes my links. Write-up 10 variations with both html and bbc code and you're good to go with most sites. You could even write up longer variations for sites that allow personal blogs.

A few quality links will out perform thousands of low quality links. Checking the link count in SERPs shows this time and again. It's not all about numbers IMHO.

d

I don't think many people would argue that quality isn't greater than quantity. But as GeorgeR pointed out... eventually that quality well runs dry and you have to find new alternatives for backlinks. You can only find so many relevant backlinks for knitted kitty sweaters.

It's also been shown that quantity can beat quality if you want to play the backlink numbers game.

If you limit yourself to only relevant quality backlinks while your competitor is outsourcing backlinks and running automated backlinking tools, they will pass you up eventually. This is the current trend and SEO has turned into a backlinking arms race. You can almost hear the hum of a hundred copies of scrapebox working away as I write this.

This is another interesting example of a website ranking in a top position that uses elements of seo that many people say don't work or you shouldn't use. Personally I have begun to go through all the back links and add many of them to my own resources. This persons back links gives you a nice little blue print to follow if you so choose. Agree, disagree, or agree to disagree, it worked. Granted there are over 19k links, but if you throw even a percentage of these link resources into your current resources, I think it'll do you good.

Are you referring to the **** Berry site mentioned in another post here?

Good thing ranking is about a whole lot more than just links!

The "Problem" isn't an unavailability of places to link from. If that were the case any spammer could rank a site solely on links.

Quality and value tend to win out over the long haul. Focus on creating more value.

Yes, sorry. I am referring to the **** berry post here in this thread. The OP brings up the age old topic of quality links, relevant links, "harmful links", etc... This discussion and debate will go on forever. Where I agree that quality and value holds up over the long haul, it cannot be ignored that back links make a huge difference. For as many examples there are of good quality sites with great content, there are just as many sites that are crappy and simply rank because of the back links. In fact, I myself have created some rather ugly and less than quality sites and have them ranking with top competition merely because of back links. It is also proven time and again that back links, relevant or not, will indeed rank your site. I certainly am not trying to drum up a discussion or debate about this because everyone has their opinion and holds fast to it. I suggest if anyone is not familiar with "Grizz", go check out his blog. How to Make Money Online for Beginners Here's a guy who easily ranks anything he wants while most of us debate the whole back linking jazz of what works and what doesn't. You really need to read through all of his blog and through the comments because there is gold in there, you just have to find it. He puts all these debates and all these "gurus" to shame when it comes to ranking and back linking. Oh, and just to touch on the **** berry article again, after going through a few pages of the back links there are a bunch of really easy and fast places to get links. Take advantage of it if you don't have any hang ups on this type of link vs. that type of link =p

LOL, I've ranked solely on unrelated links so many times I can't count.

Don't buy into all the BS regarding backlinks. If you want to spend time finding related links, fine, they'll work. If you want to spend an equal amount of time finding 10 times more unrelated backlinks, fine, they'll work too.

Just because one thing works for some people doesn't mean it's the only way. I'm just so tired of people telling others that their way is the only way.

the **** Berry site is a classic example of 'spam works'. You can't deny that what they have done doesn't work when they are sitting at the top of the SE rankings for a very competitive keyword.

From what I can tell it's primarily blog commenting. There are a couple of 2.0 sites mixed in but even those were still blog comments. I only looked over the first 500 backlinks that came up on my list so I may be missing something.

Will the site get nuked by google... it's hard to say. It is a popular spammy keyword which might lead to a manual review but even then... looking at that persons comments, they look like hand written comments to me and are generally topic relevant (not scrapebox) so have they really broken any rules?

personally I would not worry about unrelated links hurting you. as long as they are done properly and not utter spam or questionable

on a related note...i have seen some tools now which assign backlinks a "backlink strength" value.

At first glance it looks like those tools (for example mostlyblack.com and the VERY good Link Diagnosis - examine your link competition use

OBL (number of outbound links on page) + PR and then calculate a "backlink strength" value. This is very interesting for link building. I am sure there are other criteria also.