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The relevant link myth

Posted by Michael Martinez on June 18, 2007 in Seo Myths

Relevance only counts in search engine results.

Unfortunately, somewhere along the way the search engine optimization community came to the misguided conclusion that relevance is important for links. Many SEO experts now routinely advise people to get only “relevant links from relevant pages”, and wherever possible those links should only come from pages that themselves have “relevant links pointing to them”.

If you want to optimize for Ask.com, that’s probably a good philosophy. If you want to optimize for Google, Live, or Yahoo!, that’s about as inefficient as you can get with your link building. And link building is already the most inefficient means of optimizing for search engine results.

By definition, all links (that pass anchor text) are relevant. If someone with a poker site links to your “Care and handling of Asian camels” page, where the link passes anchor text, the link is relevant to your page.

The anchor text does not have to have anything to do with the topic of your page. Remember, Google’s system is built upon the faulty conclusion that inbound link anchor text can be trusted to accurately describe the contents of a Web page. Any search engine that allows links to pass anchor text also subscribes to this enormous falsehood.

So it is virtually impossible to acquire an irrelevant link. The search engines don’t recognize the concept. Even so, search engine optimizers sagely advise all readers to only get “relevant links from relevant pages”.

In essence, what the SEO collective wisdom is telling us to do is acquire links only from competitive pages, and yet linking to your competitors with anchor text relevant to their topics will only help them more than it helps you.

Relevant anchor text is a subtle metaphor for “manipulate search engine results by spamming your page to the top with repetitious link anchor text”. After all, the search engines treat the anchor text as if it is part of your on-page content. Hence, the more you repeat that anchor text, the more relevant your page will seem in the scoring process to those keywords.

The idea that a link may carry greater weight from a page that is devoted to the same topic as the destination page is another bit of nonsense that SEOs have adopted. How many of you would turn down a link from the front page of Yahoo!? I see no hands. Apparently, relevance isn’t all that it has been cooked up to be after all.

If CNN started linking to your car insurance affiliate site from their front page, would you contact their Webmaster and say, “Please stop linking to my site — CNN has nothing to do with car insurance”? Convince me that the relevant link from only relevant topics is really what you are looking for.

If you get 1,000 DIGGs tomorrow and as many links from a broad selection of Web sites, will you ask Google to let you specify a “NO LINK CREDIT” list in your robots.txt file so that it doesn’t pass anchor text from unrelated sites? I see no hands. Apparently, relevance isn’t nearly as important as natural linkage.

I can only guess how much longer SEOs will continue to babble on about “relevant links from relevant pages”. If you want to maintain a competitive advantage over the majority of SEOs, then you should hope they continue to babble like that forever. But in time common sense will prevail over collective wisdom. After all, eventually people will put 2 and 2 together to see that “22″ is a much larger number than “4″.

This is not a semantic issue. It’s an issue of perception. The perception has been shaped by a distorted interpretation of why some sites fail to achieve good results with their linkage. Those sites that engage in “excessive” reciprocal linking, or that only exchange links with sites that really have no value in themselves (no original, interesting content, no significant linkage), have no hope of being recognized as valuable sites by Google.

Just because people have engaged in cheap link building strategies with low-value sites doesn’t mean that all links from unrelated pages are harmful or unhelpful. Quite the contrary: most such links do help, and in many cases they help better than so-called “relevant links from relevant pages”.

When you’re studying a Web site’s backlink profile, don’t ask yourself how relevant the links are. Ask yourself how useful the sites linking to the destination really are. You’ll most likely find that the “useful content” test is a far better indicator of quality than the “relevant content” test.