Relevant Backlinks

by 17 replies
19
Do backlinks need to be relevant to your site's content to have significant value? I bought a backlink package and none of the links are relevant to my site so I'm concerned. Any insight is appreciated.
#search engine optimization #backlinks #relevant
  • Hi PaulintheSticks,

    You will probably get mixed advice on this due to the ambiguity of your question. It seems that many folks, especially on this forum, define relevancy differently than search engines.

    What makes a backlink relevant to your site is the anchortext of the link, the text near the link and the page's keyword relevance. Please note that website topics have no importance in SEO. All factors are from page level signals.

    So if your backlink placements include keywords in or near your anchortext then those are likely considered relevant by search engines. However, if those backlinks do not include any signals of relevance to your targeted keyword then they have no direct linking power, they only serve to boost the PR of the landing page, which has no direct influence on ranking your page for your keyword.

    You must channel that PR through a relevant link before you will see any ranking benefit. And even then, since that is a second order effect the benefit is significantly less than with relevant backlinks.
  • Thanks for your response.

    Sorry, I should clarify. The content on the sites that I have backlinks on is not relevant to my site's content. For example, I have a link to my website about roofing in my signature on a forum that is about photography. But the anchortext contains the keywords I'm trying to rank for.

    If I'm understanding you correctly, this type of link will not have "page keyword relevance" because its about photography, not roofing. But I will still get partial "relevancy" since the link's anchor text contains my keywords. Is that correct?
    • [2] replies
    • Hi PaulintheSticks,

      You are correct, Google views relevancy as a relative, not absolute value. So each link is scored for relative relevance. However, since anchortext is the most important signal of relevance, your backlinks will probably score higher in that regard.
    • Yeah mate, you got it. Its not as great as having a link from bluewidgets.com with the anchor text bluewidgets pointing to your site bluewidgets.net but you'll still get plenty of value from it depending on the pagerank of the domain. Of course, most of those backlink packets are from high domains so you should be fine.

      One thing you could do instead of just buying more packets would be to find a footprint for those forums and try and find your own forums. This way you will not have to keep buying packets and you can create accounts on forums that everyone else isn't already creating backlinks on.
  • hi there.. im a newbie and I want to know more about seo... can you share some of your ideas? i would be very thankful. godbless
  • Banned
    [DELETED]
  • Banned
    [DELETED]
  • yeah having relavent backlinks is only suggestable, coz it will increase the increase the pr but you can also try to use irrelavent backlinks with high PR.
  • A visitor reading a page containing your backlink is more likely to follow it and check out your website if that link is related to the topic of the page the visitor is reading. Going down this line, if the visitor is particularly interested in the content he/ she finds on your website, he/ she is more likely to be hooked into buying your products or services. While all this seems to point towards relevant backlinks being nothing less than ideal for one's website, the truth is they involve one major drawback - unlike generic backlinks, highly relevant backlinks are more difficult to obtain.
    • [1] reply
    • Hi mchljns678,

      Okay, I'll bite on this one.

      You are right, they do require one tiny incy wincy bit of effort beyond adding nothing but purely useless spam. But soooo worth the effort! And if you see that as a "major drawback", ...then you just might be a spammer.
      • [1] reply
  • Of course a refreshing shift from the traditional approach, this one is a good way to navigate some of these required links on to your website.
  • Banned
    [DELETED]
  • I want to know some more about Seo. Can you help and share some of your knowledge. Thanks for this info.
    • [1] reply
    • I spy a spambot! ^^
  • Yeah, really!

    I really don't like seeing the trend of auto-posting those much longer scraped snippets, like the one just above your post. ^^
  • Relevant backlinks doesn't mean just "anchor text".

    You need backlinks from pages relevant to your pages. Let's say you have a page optimized for the keyword "blue widgets". The most powerful link you can get is from another page talking "blue widgets" that has some authority..

    If an authority on "blue widgets" says your page is about "blue widgets" google will trust it and rank it higher for that term

    And it will give you much more link juice than if a page about "Cat Juggling Tutorials" links to you. A relevant backlink is not just a link with the proper "anchor text" but a link from a relevant web page. Of course having your keyword in the acnhor text is also very important.

    At least that's my understanding of SEO.. I hope what I said makes sense
    • [2] replies
    • Hi Ivelin2008,

      I believe you are mostly correct. (Notice how I said "mostly")

      Google seems to view relevance as a relative value. That means anchor text alone makes a page a little bit relevant, while your example provides extreme relevance. Extreme relevance is best, a little relevance is essential and no relevance has little to no direct value. (it can still be used indirectly by channeling PR through a downstream "relevant link").
    • You would get mixedd opinions. My opinion is that you ought to go for high-authority links (good PR, old trusted domain etc) but the page need not be relevant. However, you MUST get the right anchor text. For example, if a Wikipediap age talks about cats but gives your page a link about oranges, and your page is about oranges, then bingo, you have a errific backlink in place, IMO.
      • [1] reply
Join the discussion

Next Topics on Trending Feed

  • 19

    Relevant Backlinks

    Do backlinks need to be relevant to your site's content to have significant value? I bought a backlink package and none of the links are relevant to my site so I'm concerned. Any insight is appreciated.