How important is link relevance EXACTLY?

So you're saying domain relevance isn't as important as page relevance? What if a porn site has a page about dog breeding that links to your dog breeding website? Won't that be bad considering porn is a "bad neighborhood" for Google?

If you can get your link on a PR page with relevance, do it. If you get a chance to get your link on a high PR page that's not relevant, do it.

Build those backlinks.

That's why I'm asking how important EXACTLY is relevance...

There's this consensus that relevance is better, but how is it really?

Very important specially if you want yourself to rank on the Big G, because now big G is looking for relevancy and it means it. In order to rank higher if your link is not relevant then it is of no use apart from getting few amount of traffic from the page it has been linked to. This step it has taken to maintain relevancy of a niche and websites as well and top stop spamming. Your ranking will be gained faster with relevant backlinks!

NOW a days,link relevancy is also playing a great job for website ranking.So we should take care about link relevancy when we create backlinks for our website.No need to create backlinks from irrelevant websites.Because they can give you benefit for short time but they lose their vale very soon and you can lose your website ranking.

Definitely it is needed to have the link from the relevant page to your site and that is with the related content to yours. And if you have page that is all about the clothing and if your site get link from the web service related site then visitor came from that site will not found anything meaningful to your site and they will close your site without spending time and this will be cause for the increase in the bounce rate and which be cause for the decrease in the pagerank. So it is necessary to have the relevant link from the relevant site to own site.

A link is a link. Relavency is just one of the factors that adds to the value but quite an important factor.

Yes I think relevancy really matters in ranking your website in search engines and It'd be great to get links from high pr do follow websites along with relevant links.

This thread went down fast... all general answers from people who clearly just want to spread their signature links around. Read OP please?

If you believe Terry Kyle (a famous SEO expert), relevance of the links is irrelevant.

Google places a greater importance on the PR of the site giving you the backlink, whether or not the backlink is dofollow, and the anchor text of that backlink. Relevance helps too, but the above factors are given more weight.

Relevancy is more important in terms of user experience. e.g say you have a recipes related site and you got backlinks from similar sites then the chances are you will get good number of targeted visitors from other site. Now think of irrelevant sites say get recipe related links from science news site etc. as you can think any. What are the chances are you will get visitors? If by somehow the what will be their bounce rate? This may effect the organics positions as well in SEs.

Hi kirakirafuwafuwa,

Link relevance is not only important, it is absolutely essential to ranking. However, the way you framed the question is flawed and shows a fundamental lack of understanding of how search engines work.

Search engines index and rank individual web pages, not websites. Therefore it doesn't matter what your website theme is, it has absolutely nothing to do with ranking. However page relevance is what ranking is all about. So, while website themes have no direct relevance to SEO, page topics are of paramount importance.

To understand the role link relevance plays in SEO it is important to recognize how Google determines link relevance, not you own definition, but how Google defines relevancy. Google uses proximity as a weighting factor in determining relevancy factors, so the closer relevant keywords are linked to your page the higher your relevancy score will be influenced.

Keywords in or near the anchor text of links influence the relevancy of your link. Keyword proximity places a significant role. The closer the keyword is to your link, the stronger the relevancy signal. By placing links on relevant pages with your targeted keywords in or near the anchor text you are creating relevant links. There are other factors that effect the signal strength, including PR and trust.

for making quality back links relevancy is more important.

dburk, where are you getting this information about relevance signals? I read about Terry and he does say he found #1 ranking websites with tons of irrelevant links, and even did a test where there were zero relevant links yet he still got more than desirable ranking positions.

Now you're saying "However, irrelevant backlinks have absolutely no direct effect on rankings. Only relevant backlinks will directly influence SERP rankings." which is rather extreme in my opinion. How come irrelevant blog commenting and forum profiles work then? I guess you can argue with social bookmarks and article submissions that your main keyword is in close proximity with relevant keywords, but that is not the case with other link building methods.

It matters, but just slightly more than what you're competition has done! Your linking blueprint is there just look at whats working already! Anytime I'm about to build links I analyze the links of the top 3 spots and develop my strategy accordingly. If the pages currently ranking have 1000 links and about 30% of them are from relevant websites...then about 50% of my links I will want to have comming in from relevant domains...always 1 up your comp! And find high page rank PAGES for links NOT high pr domains! The end result is less work building links and higher relevancy!

yes, of course relevance are very much important. mainly the content relevance and the geographic relevance. this increases our back links.

I don't think relevancy is as important as a lot of people categorically state that it is. When building links to any of my sites I have not found much of a difference in ranking power between relevant and non relevant links. I used to spend a lot of time trying to get relevant links but I didn't get teh boost in rankings I was expecting. Where I have found a big difference is between high pr and low pr links. I would like to see a casestudy somewhere showing how relevant links are a lot more powerful, I have yet to see one. i find a lot of people in seo like to make claims and factual statements without having the evidence to back it up.
I would add a caveat however to the above, i still like to add relevant links in case google ever investigates my site and I think relevant links are needed in some way to make your sites backlinks look natural. It maybe they are more powerful than non relevant links everything else being equal but I don't believe they are as powerful as many people argue they are. i would also think that only building relevant links would look very unnatural in googles eyes. A natural website should have all sorts of links both relevant and non relevant, high pr and low pr.

It certainly is important as Google "reads" the text surrounding your link as well as the other text on the site to see if both are relevant to the site you are linking too. Backlinks from non-relevent sites do "count" but just not as much as ones from relevant sites. That's why guest posting on top blogs in your industry is a great strategy to not only boost your SEO but to gain readers. Hope this helps!

If you didn't already know, Google tries to organise information. I personally believe that Google is trying to replicate ODP - Open Directory Project.

So is relevancy important? Of course it is! That's if you want to rank well.

You should start using the related search operator.

Type this into Google:

related:y3trainers.net (my trainer site)

These are the top 5 results:

1# aspecto.co.uk
2# designerwear2u.co.uk
3# bigshoetime.com
4# john-anthony.com
5# cerysmaticfactory.info

As you can see, Google has grouped my site with these 5 sites together in it's index and thinks they are related, which it is. Now if Google thinks my site is related to these 5 sites, you can imagine that my rankings would rocket if I got a link of them with my anchor text.

Use the related search operator to have a better understanding of why relevancy is important. SEO has too many factors to single out as they all contribute to the ranking process. Don't make the search engines work too hard, make it easy for them.

Anyone that thinks link relevancy isn't important, your wrong, simple as that.

This example below is on-page SEO, but I'm sure it's being carried over to off-page SEO just the same.




[source]

Most people say a link is a link. That cannot be true. We know that Google places great emphasis on being relevant. So why would they forget or ignore this when considering links in the rankings? It only makes sense for both your site and Google to have relevant links.

The better questions in my opinion are, what weight do links have in the rankings and what weight do relevant links have? We don't know the real answer to those questions, only Google does. What weight in the ranking factors would you put on links? Me, if I were to build a search engine from scratch, no more than 25% and of that, 90% weight to relevant links. This means that a relevant link would have ten times the juice as an irrelevant one.

And as dburk correctly pointed out, pages are what are being ranked, not web sites as a whole. This means that the page is most relevant, not the site. A site can have many different themes, topics as dburk calls them. If a porn site happens to have a page about dog breeding (now there's something to give you nightmares), that page's theme is dog breeding and linking to it, if you had a page or site about dog breeding, you would get more juice from that link. PR in my opinion has little to do with it.

As for those who test these things, the tests are usually flawed. You cannot test one thing individually such as linking, and look at the results you get and say one thing or another. Each ranking factor cannot be taken as if in a vacuum. You can never be sure how the other factors influenced your test. There is also many other pages on the web, each vying for attention and constantly trying to do something about it. Not to mention the algorithm constantly being tweaked. For these tests to be valid, the whole Internet would have to be frozen and the test done step by step such as adding one link at a time and carefully recording and measuring the result. Oh, I forgot another thing, search engines showing personalized results. In other words, I take any tests with a grain of salt.

Shane earlier said that only building relevant links would look unnatural in Google's eyes. Why would that be?

Another problem with tests is self definitions that may not be the same as Google's. Having a quality site in most people's minds for example is not the same as Google's definition. The same may be true to some extent with links: what I consider a relevant link may not be by Google.

The thing is it's not a yes or no thing. It's a quantitative thing than a qualitative thing.

If all other factors are equal (domain age, authority, backlinks, trust etc. etc.) the 'ranking power' of a backlink from a relevant page is greater than the 'ranking power' of a backlink from a NON-relevant page - that is what I like to believe. But if you build two from NON-relevant pages, they are probably more powerful than one from a relevant page.

I've done several experiments with SENUKE and AMR where I used totally irrelevant articles and inserted my anchor text keyword inside (wasn't even grammatically correct). So it would be something like an article on internet marketing and my keyword on 'weight loss' somewhere in the middle. Guess what, my rankings improved dramatically for that keyword. If anyone subscribed to SENUKE's $297 backlinking service, you know that's what they do as well.

But what I don't know is if Google gave any credit for 'relevancy' or 'anchor text' or not. The improvement may have purely been for the backlink from a different IP address. If I had used just a hard URL without any anchor text, I may have gotten the same rank improvement. I wouldn't know! Google knows which keyword to rank it for because I already had other backlinks with that anchor text and the on page SEO.

If you do the identical backlinking campaign with a 'relevant' article, would you get better results? I would think so!

Take home message - build both types as soon as you get a new backlinking source
Chucky

dburk, you didn't really answer my question and ShaneMcc's post reflects that. I have seen Xrummer/Scrapebox blasts rank pages, and these software aren't known for relevant, high quality backlinks.

Link relevancy is important, of course, but not as important as it was in the past. Google seems to be turning down the importance of links with exact match keywords. Now it is much more important to have links with diverse anchor text and pointing to relevant inside pages on your site. This will look much more natural. And when in doubt, always use your domain name as anchor text. Google may devalue exact match links but not links with your brand.

So basically, keyword anchor text = relevance?

You know Don, I don't think relevancy is a relative value. How would it be relative and not absolute? The example I often use is, you can't be a little bit pregnant. You either are or you're not. I know this thread is about SEO but you're a PPC guy. You think relevancy in Adwords is relative? If you have any Google links about this, much appreciated but right now I don't buy it. I'm not really a SEO guy but to me, relevancy is about the pages, not the link text, although the text helps I'm sure.

Shane, I think that if we are to at least try to understand relevancy, it would be good to actually find out Google's definition. Otherwise I think we are just grasping at straws. It's the same argument in my mind about what is a quality site. Everyone is just expressing their opinion but nobody yet has said what Google's definition of quality is. In my opinion, it's not at all what everybody thinks. There's a few who seem to know, including Don, but we all seem to keep that info to ourselves.

By the way, Don, can you cite official Google references that state anchor text = relevance and page content doesn't really matter much because it will be far from the comment and link relevance is based on proximity?

Ok some may disagree...

I think it depends on what your site is about
if you have a Credit card site - then regular backlinks will not do - there is far too many people competing for the same keywords, and have a much bigger budget then you.

However - I have a site, that the keywords are very low competition, and gets a lot of searches - I got to, and still am number 3 in my keyword, and not one backlink relates to my site - I have lots and lots of unique content, and about 1500 backlinks - 100% blog commenting. I wasnt expecting much from this site - i was using it as like a seo "tester" and i was quite surprised even know Panda is watching!

One Thing:
Don't SPAM!