Irrelevant high PR backlinks or relevant backlinks?

Hi latrice17,

Don't make the mistake that many newbies make and assume that search engines use website topics for relevance, because they don't. Search engines are much more granular in their approach to indexing and ranking listings in the SERP. Search engines do not look at websites, per say, they look at individual pages and determine relevance at the page level.

When you create your own promotional backlinks you often have the ability to create some of the content that is placed with your link. If you are creative you can generally make the majority of your backlinks relevant by placing your targeted keyword in or near the anchor text of your backlink.

An irrelevant backlink has no direct influence in ranking for your targeted keyword, however you can pickup a secondary (much weaker) benefit by channeling PR from irrelevant backlinks through your optimized internal link structure. While this secondary influence is diluted it still helps some. But let me be clear on this point, you will not benefit, ranking wise, unless you channel this link juice through a relevant link. This is one of the reasons that internal link structure and optimization is so important in any serious SEO effort.