Backlink Quality?

Banned 16 years ago

Originally Posted by ciajim

if I do a site for antique brittish cars, is a backlink from an antique related site or car related site more powerful than a backlink from cooking site, given the same page rank?

Yes, undoubtedly; far more powerful.

Originally Posted by ciajim

If I hire someone to develop backlinks for me, what should I beware of, or insist on?

The main thing is to have independent, unincentivized recommendations from independent, unincentivized people who appear trustworthy and reliable. Oh yes ... they should be genuinely independent and unincentivized, too - did I say?

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tpw 16 years ago

Related links are better... Related links with real link popularity are best...

What separates the men from the boys in the link building game is the link popularity that they can push into a linking page...
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ciajim

16 years ago

Originally Posted by Alexa Smith

Yes, undoubtedly; far more powerful.

The main thing is to have independent, unincentivized recommendations from independent, unincentivized people who appear trustworthy and reliable. Oh yes ... they should be genuinely independent and unincentivized, too - did I say?

You said...I listened
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benjammin105 16 years ago

It also doesn't hurt to set up your forum signatures to get you keyword links. I have gotten at least 10 keyword links from music related forums when my product is a health product. Does it help a lot? Well it doesn't hurt, at least to my knowledge. But definitely go for stuff that falls in your niche.
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- bpachica 16 years ago
  
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  stechmendonca5 16 years ago
  
  We always think backlinks differs from forum post as well as from blog commenting as it is included in the social bookmarking.... as it also totally depends on these site where you can create new backlinks .
  
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brandonbaker

16 years ago

Originally Posted by Alexa Smith

Yes, undoubtedly; far more powerful.

I'd like to see evidence for this. I keep seeing the relevancy line being repeated, but never any hard-nosed evidence.

Link relevance does indeed matter, but it's the relevance of the anchor text, not the website, that matters.

What niche is CNN in? The "news" niche? They have absolutely zero relevancy to many of their outbound links, but those links are insanely powerful.

Originally Posted by Alexa Smith

The main thing is to have independent, unincentivized recommendations from independent, unincentivized people who appear trustworthy and reliable. Oh yes ... they should be genuinely independent and unincentivized, too - did I say?

I think more accurately, your links should appear to come from independent and unincentivized sources. Big difference there. In many--even most--cases, those sources will be independent and unincentivized. But in many other cases, they will just appear to be so, and they carry just as much weight.

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dburk

16 years ago

Originally Posted by brandonbaker

I'd like to see evidence for this. I keep seeing the relevancy line being repeated, but never any hard-nosed evidence.

Link relevance does indeed matter, but it's the relevance of the anchor text, not the website, that matters.

What niche is CNN in? The "news" niche? They have absolutely zero relevancy to many of their outbound links, but those links are insanely powerful.

I think more accurately, your links should appear to come from independent and unincentivized sources. Big difference there. In many--even most--cases, those sources will be independent and unincentivized. But in many other cases, they will just appear to be so, and they carry just as much weight.

Hi brandonbaker,

You are correct, search engines don't index websites, they index web pages. There is no such thing as website relevance in SEO only web page relevance.

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thomarv29

16 years ago

Wow, I have never seen so many people on Warrior Forum be soooo wrong about backlinks. DBurk, I would have expected a tirade from you at least of all people... Relevancy in terms of "Site" niche does not matter, its all about the "webpage" your link is created on. If its not relevant you can easily make it relevant by adding your keyword in anchor text surrounded by LSI Keywords in the text around the link. When you focus on trying to find "Do-Follow" Relevant websites to link on you waste a lot of valuable time that could have been spent building links on High PR Sites in larger quantity. I would much rather have loads of backlinks from high pr irrelevant sites with my keywords in anchor text than all relevant backlinks and 1/3rd as many. Now all of this is simply talk unless you have real world experience and can prove what your talking about which i can. I have a website we got up and started building high PR backlinks with lots of link and keyword variation with no relevancy in mind when building the links. After two weeks we had built 18K links and the day our URL was finally indexed by Google, we were already ranked on 16 Short string keywords many of which were on the first page in the first spot. The keywords were all directly related to our niche and very competitive. We did this all for about 6k using backlinkteam.com. The site is located in my sig file if you want to see proof for yourself. None of the links we created are relevant yet there we are ranked on pretty much any "Barter" related keyword. Hope this helps to dispell some of the myths about link relevancy. Trust me it does not matter so dont waste your time with it. Quantity will always outrank Quality.

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HN

Banned 15 years ago

Originally Posted by thomarv29

Wow, I have never seen so many people on Warrior Forum be soooo wrong about backlinks. DBurk, I would have expected a tirade from you at least of all people... Relevancy in terms of "Site" niche does not matter, its all about the "webpage" your link is created on. If its not relevant you can easily make it relevant by adding your keyword in anchor text surrounded by LSI Keywords in the text around the link. When you focus on trying to find "Do-Follow" Relevant websites to link on you waste a lot of valuable time that could have been spent building links on High PR Sites in larger quantity. I would much rather have loads of backlinks from high pr irrelevant sites with my keywords in anchor text than all relevant backlinks and 1/3rd as many. Now all of this is simply talk unless you have real world experience and can prove what your talking about which i can. I have a website we got up and started building high PR backlinks with lots of link and keyword variation with no relevancy in mind when building the links. After two weeks we had built 18K links and the day our URL was finally indexed by Google, we were already ranked on 16 Short string keywords many of which were on the first page in the first spot. The keywords were all directly related to our niche and very competitive. We did this all for about 6k using backlinkteam.com. The site is located in my sig file if you want to see proof for yourself. None of the links we created are relevant yet there we are ranked on pretty much any "Barter" related keyword. Hope this helps to dispell some of the myths about link relevancy. Trust me it does not matter so dont waste your time with it. Quantity will always outrank Quality.

Hi Robert,
Half a year later, can you still back up your words? You obviously changed your sig, because the site in your sig isn't even indexed and it's PR0 even though it has 101 Linking Root Domains and 237 total links. Any chance you have been slapped by google for link spamming?

Is this video going to change your link building strategy at all?

How Google's Panda Update Changed SEO Best Practices Forever - Whiteboard Friday | SEOmoz

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brandonbaker

16 years ago

Originally Posted by dburk

Hi brandonbaker,

You are correct, search engines don't index websites, they index web pages. There is no such thing as website relevance in SEO only web page relevance.

Well, I'd like to see evidence for "web page relevance" being a legit SEO factor. Any experiments run on this?

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dburk

16 years ago

Originally Posted by brandonbaker

Well, I'd like to see evidence for "web page relevance" being a legit SEO factor. Any experiments run on this?

LOL, surely you jest?

And for those reading this thread that are new to SEO, and are really wondering how search engines actually work, here is a nice short video to explain some of the most basic concepts of how search engines, like Google, actually work:

YouTube - How Search Works

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brandonbaker

16 years ago

Originally Posted by dburk

LOL, surely you jest?

And for those reading this thread that are new to SEO, and are really wondering how search engines actually work, here is a nice short video to explain some of the most basic concepts of how search engines, like Google, actually work:

I think we might be mixed up here (or not):

Obviously I know web page relevance matters for a direct search result. That is, a page that is relevant to helicopters will rank for the term "helicopters." As far I can tell, that's all Matt Cutts is telling me in that video.

What I'm talking about is the relevance of the page where a backlink is coming from. So, to keep the example, a page about helicopters linking to another page (on a different domain) that is also about helicopters. I haven't seen any evidence that this link is more powerful (all things equal) than a link from a site about gerbils.

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dburk

16 years ago

Originally Posted by brandonbaker

I think we might be mixed up here (or not):

Obviously I know web page relevance matters for a direct search result. That is, a page that is relevant to helicopters will rank for the term "helicopters." As far I can tell, that's all Matt Cutts is telling me in that video.

What I'm talking about is the relevance of the page where a backlink is coming from. So, to keep the example, a page about helicopters linking to another page (on a different domain) that is also about helicopters. I haven't seen any evidence that this link is more powerful (all things equal) than a link from a site about gerbils.

Hi brandonbaker,

There you go again: "a link from a site about gerbils."

You just can't help yourself, can you?

Website topics have absolutely nothing to do with SEO. Search engines never even try to understand what a website is about, only what a page is about.

And yes, we do agree that the elements that are treated as the strongest signals of relevance vary according to the context of the situation. While a page title is arguably the strongest signal of relevance for on-page scoring, the anchortext element is the strongest signal in context of a backlink.

Where we seem to possibly disagree, just a bit, is whether there are other signals of relevance for a backlink besides simply anchortext. I assert that text near the anchor is also a signal of relevance and to a lesser degree so is the page title and nearby headings. The reason these are different from on-page factors is that Google uses principles of prominence and proximity as part their weighting factors. The words in and near the anchortext element are more prominent and have closer proximity than other elements within the context of a backlink.

Google's founders discuss those principles and claim to use them in their algorithm as disclosed by the white papers they produced during the original development of Google's technology while attending Stanford. It's been a core part of Google's technology from the very beginning.

There is a lot that has been disclosed about how Google works. The main thing they have kept secret is how much weight they apply to the various signals of relevance within the overall relevancy score. They are not the mystical magical black box that so many folks seem to suggest they are, at least not if you willing to read about how their technology works and you can understand a little about statistics and a bit of advanced math.

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brandonbaker

16 years ago

Originally Posted by dburk

Hi brandonbaker,

There you go again: "a link from a site about gerbils."

Ha, no I can't help myself. I meant "page" there, not "site." In most cases we kind of use these interchangeably so I mix them up. But I totally agree with you that SITE relevance has no...relevance.

Here's something I pulled up from The Anatomy of a Search Engine by Page and Brin:

We are also working to extend the use of link structure and link text. Simple experiments indicate PageRank can be personalized by increasing the weight of a user's home page or bookmarks. As for link text, we are experimenting with using text surrounding links in addition to the link text itself. A Web search engine is a very rich environment for research ideas. We have far too many to list here so we do not expect this Future Work section to become much shorter in the near future.

Interesting stuff, but no confirmation either way as to whether they're using surrounding text as an indicator. This was also written eons ago, so a lot has changed since then, but again, this neither confirms nor denies either side of the story...

I also wonder about the weighting of this factor.

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paulgl

16 years ago

I must have been on vacation when this thread started. But I can get in now!
Alexa rocks, as usual!

I know people hate it when I quote google because they are hell-bent on
ignoring google recommendations.

But here goes nothing.

Our goal is to return highly relevant results for every query.

Incoming links to your site help Google determine your site's relevance to the user's query.

Your site's ranking in Google search results is partly based on analysis of those sites that link to you. The quantity, quality, and relevance of links count towards your rating. The sites that link to you can provide context about the subject matter of your site, and can indicate its quality and popularity.

The best way to get other sites to create relevant links to yours is to create unique, relevant content that can quickly gain popularity in the Internet community. The more useful content you have, the greater the chances someone else will find that content valuable to their readers and link to it.

It is not only the number of links you have pointing to your site that matters, but also the quality and relevance of those links. Creating good content pays off: Links are usually editorial votes given by choice, and the buzzing blogger community can be an excellent place to generate interest.

Paul

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brandonbaker 16 years ago

Paul,

A lot of that can be chalked up to the relevancy of Anchor Text. The only line that I see that can be interpreted as agreeing with what Alexa said is:

The sites that link to you can provide context about the subject matter of your site, and can indicate its quality and popularity.

But even this I find to be more than a little vague. Could be seen as referring to anchor text, too, but there's no way to know.
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Cataclysm1987

16 years ago

Originally Posted by Alexa Smith

Yes, undoubtedly; far more powerful.

The main thing is to have independent, unincentivized recommendations from independent, unincentivized people who appear trustworthy and reliable. Oh yes ... they should be genuinely independent and unincentivized, too - did I say?

No, they aren't.

Google doesn't really even know or have a well enough programmed algorithm to determine a site's relevance in relation to OBL's in the first place.

And even if they did, why would it matter? A site itself is not necessarily related to the backlink. Sites go off topic all the time. Why should Google care?

If links like this really were that much different, it would require that webmasters would acquire them, which would mean they'd run out of relevant sites in no time at all and be forced to leverage other means of generating backlinks, which leaves most everything else we do in SEO.

What really matters is the relevance of the content surrounding your link.

Google understands sites talk about thousands of different topics. There are cooking websites that link to antique car sites.

IT'S STILL A VOTE OF CONFIDENCE WHETHER THE SITE IS RELEVANT OR NOT!

Look more at the relevance of your surrounding text. Google has to look at whatever is closest to your link with the greatest weight in order to determine the most accurate method of counting its value.

So, an article about antique cars with a contextual backlink to your site is pretty much as powerful on a site about antique cars as it is on a site about training your dog not to pee on the carpet. The site itself is further away from your link than the directly surrounding pieces of content are.

Focus on that instead.

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sijugk

16 years ago

Originally Posted by Cataclysm1987

No, they aren't.

And even if they did, why would it matter? A site itself is not necessarily related to the backlink. Sites go off topic all the time. Why should Google care?

You have the point as the web-master has the right to point any links from his website. But in Google's point of view there is no logical reason for pointing an antique car site from a page which tells how to prepare fruit salad. Here comes the conflict.

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Cataclysm1987

16 years ago

Originally Posted by sijugk

You have the point as the web-master has the right to point any links from his website. But in Google's point of view there is no logical reason for pointing an antique car site from a page which tells how to prepare fruit salad. Here comes the conflict.

Why not?

There are plenty of unrelated sites that link to random crap.

Think about article directories or blogs. Many people blog about random stuff all the time.

And many article directories talk about thousands of different topics, many of them totally unrelated in terms of keywords.

I don't see Google slapping any of that any time soon. Do you?

I stand by my original argument. Pay attention to what's around the link first, and the site it's coming from last.

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RanD

16 years ago

Backlinks from link farms are pretty much useless these days, so make sure they aren't just submitting you to a bunch of those, and charging you for good backlinks. You also want to avoid too many link exchanges where you are swapping links.

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jhonsean

16 years ago

Yes, Indeed. Its a relevancy that produces informative story where you can find it categorized and specific this is how it generates as quality backlinks an effective way for page ranking.

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Summer1

16 years ago

Wow, i am a newbie of backlink and webmaster stuff

I didn't know that backlink relevancy matters. I thought as long as we comment to a dofollow blogs, i will have quality backlinks.

Great new stuff to learn!

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kposs

16 years ago

If you compared backlinking manually from relevant sites against a campaign of unrelated profile links, bookmarks, blog comments, etc., the latter will win every time. The importance of relevance is really not that significant and I've never seen any evidence to the contrary.

The following sites should give you all the information you need to evaluate links (I like people who actually test their theories):

SEOmoz | All Links are Not Created Equal: 10 Illustrations on Search Engines' Valuation of Links

Link Building Factors - The Aspects That Really Drive Results

Notice no mention of relevance in either.

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chrisgause12

16 years ago

Google uses its system of proportional representation to indicate what it sees as the value or quality of a website. The higher the PR, the higher the quality as determined by Google. But only one of the factors Google considers when determining the position of a site in the SERPs. If you can buy backlinks from high PR your site will benefit greatly Google robot will become your best Buddie .

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24kWing

16 years ago

Many people will tell you "Yes", it matters. BUT, I have found that the PageRank of the site that I am linking FROM is just as important. High PageRank passes Huge Link Juice, related or not. Just A Thought!

Good Luck!
24kWing

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sijugk

16 years ago

Relevancy of the page that matter. If I have a multi-niche blog each page is treated differently and my blog is a collection of multiple pages. Any link from my blog page which says about fruits will benefit a fruit or food items website than a tech site. See how links from ezine valued. I totally agree with dburk

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mahesh2010

16 years ago

Yes off course but you may also have other links not related to your site but having related links grab the visitors attention this helpful to you by making a visitor visiting your site again and again

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islandville

16 years ago

Do signatures links considered high value?

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sijugk

16 years ago

But Robert, It is Google who tell us the importance of relevancy. How can we disbelieve Google ?

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thomarv29

16 years ago

Originally Posted by sijugk

But Robert, It is Google who tell us the importance of relevancy. How can we disbelieve Google ?

Do you really believe that Google wants you to understand SEO? The whole purpose of creating search algorithms is to confuse us SEO guys. Relevancy only matters in terms of matching Anchor Text from the link and the landing page and maybe some LSI around the anchor text to make it stick better. I have sites ranked for very competitive SEO Related keywords and never bothered building relevant links.

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dburk

16 years ago

Originally Posted by thomarv29

I have sites ranked for very competitive SEO Related keywords and never bothered building relevant links.

Hi thomarv29,

Search engines don't rank "sites", they rank individual pages.

I think the confusion on this topic comes from misguided notion that search engines try to recognize website topics, they don't. They are much more granular in their indexing capabilities.

A website can have an unlimited number of pages covering an unlimited number of topics. Search engines never look at site level factors as this would only serve to lessen search result quality. They index the specific page and determine which keywords are relevant for that individual page. Website topics are not part of SEO. Website topics have absolutely nothing to do with backlink or page relevancy. All SEO factors are page level factors.

I'm sorry to speak so harshly, but folks that keep referring to backlink relevance as if it has something to do with website topics lack the most basic understanding of how search engines actually work.

Sure we could all come up with our own definition of what it means to be relevant, but how is that useful within the context of SEO? Shouldn't we be using the search engines' methods of determining relevancy?

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thomarv29

16 years ago

Originally Posted by dburk

Hi thomarv29,

Search engines don't rank "sites", they rank individual pages.

I think the confusion on this topic comes from misguided notion that search engines try to recognize website topics, they don't. They are much more granular in their indexing capabilities.

A website can have an unlimited number of pages covering an unlimited number of topics. Search engines never look at site level factors as this would only serve to lessen search result quality. They index the specific page and determine which keywords are relevant for that individual page. Website topics are not part of SEO. Website topics have absolutely nothing to do with backlink or page relevancy. All SEO factors are page level factors.

I'm sorry to speak so harshly, but folks that keep referring to backlink relevance as if it has something to do with website topics lack the most basic understanding of how search engines actually work.

Sure we could all come up with our own definition of what it means to be relevant, but how is that useful within the context of SEO? Shouldn't we be using the search engines' methods of determining relevancy?

Hey Dburk,
That was actually the point i was trying to get across, you are absolutely right.

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citiusonline.com 16 years ago

Yes Of course.

If you get backlinks with relative website will help you better.
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rain21

16 years ago

yea.. you are absolutely correct...

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nicolastraffic2 16 years ago

i am agree with your reply
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mimifr

15 years ago

if I hire someone to develop backlinks for me, I'm aways beware of some illegal sites.

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dagaul101

15 years ago

A backlink from a site related to your niche is more important than a backlink from one that isn't as he search engines are always trying to serve the most related resource, having backlinks from your own niches can only help your cause

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IT Support 15 years ago

We know the back link through the related site is more important but what u say website have 0 back link but PR is 5.
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