do backlinks have to be in your niche to count?

I would think it definitely matters to SE's. I would guess SE's look at your keywords with those in the backlinked page and gives it a certain score. I'm just guessing that it would be the logical way of doing things unless someone else here knows something that I am not aware as far as SE algorithms. Up to what point does it matter is anyone's guess...

I doubt SE bots such as Google-bot has time to do deep classification, so my best guess would be, it compares keyword density of backlinks and yours at best.

Example, my reply here as a backlink from WF and relevant to keyword "backlink" would be of little to no link juice if the main keyword on my page was "shoe", but would be of higher value if I was in the backlinking business.

Bernard

got ya,il keep building links i think at the moment and when i get a bit more time i can begin to target specifile niche related abcklinks

Every quality backlinks count but the one's from a similar site to yours counts even more.

Google can not determined the niche as some websites like ezine have 1000s of niches, but they still rank very well! Just backlink from sites with PR of at least 3 or more, seems to work perfectly fine for me. I have never had any problems.

-Owen

if you need a hight qulaity back links which may send traffic then niche matter.Most of the web directory have lots of category you will find right place..but still if you dont find put your link in general category...if you need just back link then i think niche dont mater...

This is an easy answer.

YES

and...

NO

:confused:

Okay, perhaps it is not as easy as it may sound. It's like the question of do no-follow links help rankings. Again the answer is YES & NO.

You want links that are targeted to your niche. These are important because they drive your focused keyword phrases up uP UP and away.

But you also want to appear natural to the search engines. If all your links that you are building point to the same keyword phrases then that is certainly not natural and your rankings will suffer accordingly. Therefore having links that are not highly targeted for your niche can also be important.

The more natural the growth of your Website appears the better your results.

On a similar topic... many people miss giving one way links to highly niched sites within their topic. Search engines (especially Google) view your site as an authority site when you do this and as such giving away links brings great value to your projects.

Here's how I do that.

1. Go to Alexa
2. Search my keyword term
3. Look for related sites that are above 100,000 in ranking results on Alexa
4. Build links to them.

All backlinks are counted but the backlinks of your niche is regarded as pure and some of these backlinks can boost your search engine ranking in a short time and irrelevant backlinks takes longer time to get your site ranked.