How many Backlinks are to many ?

Hi Brandi,

If you call a backlink "relevant" based on the "website topic", then what is a backlink called that has no relevant anchor text, no relevant text on a page that has no relevance to your targeted keyword? Do you call that a "relevant backlink" because some page somewhere else on the website is relevant? Search engines don't see it that way. How does it serve our purpose to refer to it as "relevant backlink" when the search engines do not see it as relevant. I see this as the mislabeling of a term which leads to confusion.

What do you call a backlink that is on a page that is highly relevant, using relevant anchor text, but the main website topic is not related? Do you call that backlink an "irrelevant backlink"? Does it make sense to call a backlink from a highly relevant page "irrelevant" because the website topic differs? Don't you see how absurdly confusing that makes it for anyone trying to make sense of what you are saying.

This also flies in the face of how search engines work. They don't see website topics. They only see individual pages and how those pages link to other pages, regardless of which website they are located on. Website topics are irrelevant to SEO, therefore it serves no purpose to refer to the relevance of a website topic when discussing SEO, it only confuses things. It makes you say silly things like calling backlinks from highly relevant pages "irrelevant backlinks" just because other pages on that website include different topics.

This is a classic example of using a term out of context. In the context of SEO, there is no such thing as website relevance. Search engines do not index websites, they index individual web pages. This is a fundamental concept in understanding basic SEO. It is also the root cause of so much confusion in the SEO industry.

If we drop the notion of relevant "websites" and instead look at page relevance we can see things related to SEO more clearly. We see backlinks from relevant "pages" as "relevant backlinks". We see backlinks from pages without any relevance as "irrelevant backlinks". It's clear, it's accurate and it's true.

Then we can see that irrelevant backlinks don't help us rank for our targeted keyword. I'm sure that you don't mean to imply that a backlink from a page about "auto insurance" with anchortext about "auto insurance" and nothing at all on the page about "dog training" will help you rank for the keyword "dog training". That just doesn't work. Your backlinks must be relevant to have any real benefit towards ranking for your targeted keyword. Nowhere does website topic play a role in SEO.

Please don't take me wrong, I don't mean to belittle your opinion. I just don't buy into the argument that just because many people think of irrelevant backlinks as relating to website topic, that it is correct terminology, or that it is useful to look at it that way. Most people use to think that the world was flat and that you would sail off the edge of the earth if you went too far.

I'm trying to get folks to look at SEO as it really works by explaining some basic facts. Hopefully this will help those that are willing to open their eyes and see the truth. It doesn't help folks much to keep talking about concepts in such contradictory fashion. How can we explain what makes a backlink relevant while calling relevant backlinks "irrelevant" and irrelevant backlinks as relevant based on website topics, which happens to be irrelvant to SEO.