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Relevant links are overrated, or not?

by jaybo
7 replies
  • SEO
    • |
I've spent a lot of time reading Terry Kyles 60 day experiment here on WF, one of the most important eye-openers for me was: Relevancy is overrated.

It's logical to me that computers have a difficult time spotting the difference between a relevant link to a non-relevant one, if it's subject-wise.

What (i think) would be easier to spot for a computer is language relevancy. If a Dutch website has links pointing to it from sites that have no Dutch language at all I would say thats easy to spot as non-relevant. (why would a website with English visitors link to a Dutch website?)

Does anyone have any experience on this?
#links #overrated #relevant
  • Profile picture of the author PhilipSEO
    Originally Posted by jaybo View Post

    I've spent a lot of time reading Terry Kyles 60 day experiment here on WF, one of the most important eye-openers for me was: Relevancy is overrated.

    It's logical to me that computers have a difficult time spotting the difference between a relevant link to a non-relevant one, if it's subject-wise.

    What (i think) would be easier to spot for a computer is language relevancy. If a Dutch website has links pointing to it from sites that have no Dutch language at all I would say thats easy to spot as non-relevant. (why would a website with English visitors link to a Dutch website?)

    Does anyone have any experience on this?
    Please don't take offense at my saying so, your logic is mistaken. It's not about "computers" detecting relevancy, it's about Google constructing relevancy. It's not that Google will penalize you if you get irrelevant links, it's that you won't be able to take advantage of the relevancy that they do pass. A "dofollow" link passes 4 kinds of values:
    1. topical relevance
    2. geographical relevance
    3. trust
    4. Google PageRank
    All these are valuable in thier own ways and relatively independent of each other, so obviously, yes, you can benefit from irrelevant links, just not from the relevancy component.

    For example, links from sites about health products make your site more relevant to health products in Google's eyes. But if your site is about dog training, you are unlikely to take advantage of that relevancy. Similarly, if your site is relevant to China but you get a lot of links from Irish sites, this increases your site's relevance to Ireland in Google's eyes (your rankings in google.ie will improve!), but you are unlikely to take advantage of this relevance since you are not targeting Ireland.

    I hope this helps!
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  • Profile picture of the author Tom Goodwin
    Originally Posted by jaybo View Post

    I've spent a lot of time reading Terry Kyles 60 day experiment here on WF, one of the most important eye-openers for me was: Relevancy is overrated.

    It's logical to me that computers have a difficult time spotting the difference between a relevant link to a non-relevant one, if it's subject-wise.

    What (i think) would be easier to spot for a computer is language relevancy. If a Dutch website has links pointing to it from sites that have no Dutch language at all I would say thats easy to spot as non-relevant. (why would a website with English visitors link to a Dutch website?)

    Does anyone have any experience on this?
    Yes, it is way overrated. One can talk about what Google should do in theory until they are blue in the face (in theory, Google probably shouldn't rely as much on backlinks, but that's another story), but what actually matters is what Google actually does, and what it rewards, in practice.


    For instance, we have >200 high PR domains that we own. All but 2 of these sites are in English (and the 2 outliers are in Spanish).

    The topics are about everything. if the previous site was about santa claus, then we have an article about santa claus on our domain

    We sell links to clients who have sites in wide-ranging niches, such as:

    -animal training
    -computers
    -electronic gadgets
    -travel
    -jewelry
    -exercise
    -weightloss
    the list goes on and on.

    We also have clients who have sites in Italian, Dutch and German we sell links to from these same sites.

    Guess what happens? The rankings skyrocket. if the backlink is from an authority domain which talks about computers, and links to a site about exercise, will it help the exercise rankings immensely? absolutely. We do it day in and day out. Same goes for other languages. We absolutely rule google.it

    People need to stop getting hung up about the topic of the site with the outgoing link and focus more effort on the authority of that domain.

    Tom
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  • Profile picture of the author Fraggler
    Well said, Philip.

    The problem is that irrelevant links do work when you have enough of them...

    Give the related:domain.com a try in Google and see what Google thinks is related to your site. Often these results are related to your backlinks, not on-site content.
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  • Profile picture of the author jaybo
    @ PhilipSEO, thanks! Clears up a lot of my thoughts. I still have to agree with Tom that non-related links still work very well.

    I've noticed your sig btw, do you link to non-www and www version to have them act as two different anchor-texts?
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  • Profile picture of the author jazbo
    Relevant links do of course carry more weight. However, any decent link will do.

    Relevancy is irrelevant!
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    • Profile picture of the author dburk
      Hi Warriors,

      I'd like to inject my opinion here on link relevance. I would say for SEO, link relevance is an absolute requirement for any direct influence on SERP ranking. Those that imply otherwise, have simply failed to understand how Google determines relevance.

      I believe those who assert relevant backlinks are somehow irrelevant, lack a fundamental understanding of how Google, and all modern search engines, index websites. They are much more granular in their approach to indexing than some folks seem to realize. Technically, they don't index websites at all, instead they index individual web documents. Therefore, there is no such thing as "website relevance", instead search engines calculate individual web document relevance.

      To clarify my point: Website relevance is irrelevant to search engines, however web page relevance is of paramount importance. And this is where many, otherwise bright folks, fail to comprehend SEO as it really works.

      Some might argue that they have ranked well with so called "irrelevant backlinks", and I will assert that they are mistaken. In actuality, they have channeled PR from irrelevant pages through a relevant backlink, typically from a relevant page on their own website. It is the relevant link on the intermediate page that provides the ranking influence. Without channeling the PR through a relevant backlink those "irrelevant backlinks" have absolutely no direct benefit on your rankings.

      So, yes you can channel the potential value of link juice from irrelevant links to an intermediate page, but you are diluting the link juice, and if you fail to channel your acquired link juice through a relevant link you will never see any SERP benefit.
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  • Profile picture of the author Colossal
    relevance is very hard to calculate

    using my niche as an example, just because someone is talking about math, doesn't mean they're not talking about the odds of a certain outcome in a casino game

    or if someone is talking about food, and suddenly the topic goes into chemistry, which is actually still relevant to nutrition

    Google is an algorithm, it's not perfect, as of right now relevance is probably over-rated
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