Is Relevancy Irrelevant?
An aspect of linkbuilding that is sometimes hotly debated in the various popular marketing forums is relevancy of the link source. Some people hold the opinion that the topic of the website providing the backlink is irrelevant whereas others consider this aspect of a backlink’s value to be significant.
Based on my own experience I think that the topic of the website hosting the backlink is not very important. However, the topic of the page in which the backlink is placed does have some significance.
So, in my opinion, page relevancy is important, but website relevancy isn’t. This opinion is shared with those who have contributed to the excellent link value factors evaluation carried out by wiep.net.
In practice what this means is that if you are building links to a page that is about ‘web design’ then establishing backlinks in other pages that are about or related to web design is likely to be more beneficial than gaining links from pages that don’t relate to web design, even if the topic of the site is primarily web design.
Tony is a Senior Search Engine Optimisation Engineer at FreshEgg.com
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11 Responses to “Is Relevancy Irrelevant?”
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Relevancy matters in SEO right? An alternative view (highly recommended): http://dailyseotip.com/is-relevancy-irrelevant/830/
what are most important page relevancy factors?
thanks man good issue
That’s good advice, Tony. That stands to reason, that the web page relevancy is more important than the actual website for SEO. This is emphasised in PPC as well, as Google gives a higher quality score in AdWords for keywords that have particularly relevant landing pages.
For creating backlinks irrelevancy is all right but if you want backlink and targeted visitor so relevancy really matters.
Page relevancy is everything, the website itself? Not so much actually. People will use a search engine because it will filter out what they require; whether they need to know something new or whether they are using it to look for something they would like to buy.
Relevancy is very important, I have read many articles saying that. That’s why I make my links always relevant to where I link from….
Site relevancy is most important .when it comes to your SEO strategy, and that includes the daily happenings in search engine users’ lives.
Hey Tony,
I know there is no way to quantify what the relevancy is worth, especially given that Google modifies things all of the time. However if you had to take a guess, how relevant is the relevancy of the specific page your link comes from?
For instance, all else being equal, would 1 link from a highly relevant page, produce results as say 2, 5 or 10 links from a non relevant page? Again everything else is equal. Same site, just two different pages, with same PR, one relevant to your site, the other not.
I know nobody knows the answer to this, but what would your ballpark guess be?
Relevancy comes in various forms. I agree that the website subject probably has little impact and that the page has more impact. The title of the page does play a part in the equation I’m sure. However, the key factor is the anchor text used with the backlink. If the page title and the anchor text are both relevant then that is the best combination.
This is quite true. I think both pages matter but then at times they must not be relevant for them to share links. Sites can still gain links from other sites which are not related to them.