LINK BUILDING - Does it really matter if the link is not relevant?
-
Hi guys,
I have just done a lot of link buillding and I thought I am just going to link build and I am not going to go after RELVANT links.
I have property/real esate website and I have been any kind of link builidng and I have noteced some good increases in rankings..
So my questions is; Does it really matter if the link is relvant to property or real estate if I have got ranking increases? Or will it later harm my site??
Thanks
Gareth
-
What about Charities? If I earn a link from a charity clearly it's not a relevant link.
How are directories relevant? Cleary DMOZ, Business etc... don’t have anything to do with your website?
What if an SEO blogger writes a article on a best industry website... say "tractors.com" this isn't a relevant link and is complete natural?
What happens if a supplier links to your website... That does your CRM system? This isn't a relevant link?
Secondly if your selling "Tractors" and get a link from a business blog or finance blog (with high DA) this isn't relevant, but people who read business/finance blog still buy "Trackers"? So doesn't that make them relevant?
How you do determine what’s relevant and what’s not? It's very difficult to get relevant links high DA websites if you’re in a very specific niche.
I've seen business with a net worth of 100 billion... but plenty of links that are high DA, but not complete relevant links? How can a business of this size possibly take these risks?
Isn't it ok to get irrelevant links along as they are not paid links?
-
I should be clear that I'm absolutely in favor of building relevant links - I think they're better for traffic, conversion, etc., and are a future-proofing quality signal. I just don't want to tell you that relevance is critical to SEO/ranking, as it just seems that's not as true as I'd like it to be.
There are no hard limits, but it really depends on quality. For example, if you attract links through content marketing or social media, you could get 100s of links in a day and have no problems. There's no limit on "natural" links. If you're pushing the quality boundary or manually link-building, you do have to be more careful, but that depends on the nature of the link-building. The best I can tell you is to diversify. Don't rely too much on any one tactic, especially when you're starting out. A new link profile is a lot more vulnerable than one with a solid base of high-authority links.
-
Dr. Peter,
I have a doubt. I usually make my link building manually and I definitly think is more wise doing like this, because I actually can choose what links are interesting to my objective and also I can document all those links and control the situacion.
My main doubt is, how many links should I do everyday? I mean, is there any limit? Any thing that I should now?
Tks in advance!
Pedro M Pereira
-
I'm going to come somewhere in the middle. I think the data supports Eppie in that relevance doesn't matter nearly as much as we think it should (except for anchor text). Relevant pages typically don't pass more link-juice than irrelevant pages, and Google probably doesn't have the capacity to test relevance on every single link (that's a huge computational task).
On the other hand, chasing only low-relevance links can bite you. Too often, low-relevance means low-quality in other dimensions, and it can be a negative signal or even lead to a penalty. Diversity is very important. I wouldn't worry about relevance in terms of any given link - if you could get a link from CNN.com and it wasn't very relevant, for example - do it. No question. If you only have low-relevance links, though, you're probably doing something wrong.
Keep in mind, too, that links have other value, including traffic and lead-generation. Low-relevance links probably have no value beyond SEO. If Google devalues them, you're left with nothing. If Google ignores a high-relevance link, but it's driving traffic, you're still making money.
-
Great thanks Charles -
So basically if I find high domain authooruty releated sites would this help do you think??
Should I be looking for domain authority of about 75+ ??
-
Keeping it topical is usually best if, as Eppie noted, it is a site you genuinely care about.
Since you have a site I am going to assume you spent some time before building the site thinking about who your audience is.
The litmus test you should use is this.
If you had a link on the site you are looking at, and your audience came across the link would they think it was out of place? Or would the context of the link be a natural fit with the overall theme of your site?
If it is a natural fit, then go for it. If it isn't then it is probably going to be viewed as spammy.
-
No, you don't need relevant links to improve the rankings of your website. You need links from sites with authority using anchor text variations that include your target keyword.
I could give you hundreds of examples of competitive search results where the sites ranking #1 pull all (or a vast majority) of their links from unrelated sites. For the sake of brevity, I'll give you a single example that illustrates the point very well.
Do a Google search for pitching machines and you're likely to see pitchingmachines.net as the first result. This site has an advantage in that it's an exact match domain, but if you explore its link profile you'll see that a huge chunk of their links come from a blog network and almost none of their links come from relevant sites. Most of the websites they get links from include content covering a wide range of topics.
As to potential harm to your site later, I'd exercise some caution. My personal rule of thumb is that if it's a site I can't afford to get banned (a client's site or a real business of mine), I only build links I'd feel comfortable explaining to Google. If you're not afraid of a potential ban and just want to rank and bank as much as you can quickly, then don't worry about it.
-
Hi Charles,
Thank you very much for input! Really useful!
I have been doing work on social and now I am going to try and build property related links.
My website is based around property, homes, houses and real estate so do you think if i build links from websites that is home, houses, property and real esate realated then it should be OK???
Thanks
G
-
Relevancy matters.
The links will count until one of your competitors notices and reports you, or until Google's team notices and penalizes you as it will be perceived as an unnatural gaming of the system.
Overall it is a gamble.
Neither of those things might happen.
If they do happen then Google might just discount the links, and not penalize the site directly. Or they could pull a JC Penny and penalize the site across the board for a set period of time.
Basically you are spending time on getting bad links when you could spend your time building new quality content and getting word out to real people about your products/services via blogs and social media.
Your choice is a valid choice, but can backfire, and should be thought of as a high risk short term choice
Hope that helps.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Looking for a trusted link building service
Can anyone recommend a service to build quality links to our site and work with us on a content strategy, preferably UK based? We have recently recovered from a link penalty and whilst this has been removed we now need to re-build a quality bank link profile. I've looked into the Moz recommendations but not many seem to be based in the UK or if that doesn't matter then I'd be interested to know people's experience. Basically, since the penalty we've become very nervous about link building even though we didn't necessarily create the problem! As a small team we've looked to outsource this and have looked at VA's but not confident the links they will achieve will be of good quality
Link Building | | Ham19790 -
Frequency of Manual Link Building Monitoring
Hey Moz! We're in the middle of performing a link remediation campaign, and had a question regarding new links. We do not acquire any links through methods that break Google's guidelines, but we recently discovered a suspicious link to our website that happened organically. What is the recommended frequency for manually checking all newly discovered links to our website in order to catch/remove toxic links? Monthly? Bi-monthly? Yearly? Thanks in advance!
Link Building | | TheDude0 -
Help on Link Building
Hi, Recently I've dropped two points on my Root Domain Authority for smallhope.com. Not really sure why. I've done as much on page optimisation that I can think of, but what I would really like some help on is Link Building. If this was your domain what would you do specifically and start link building. I've read a ton of stuff but I just dont seem to know a way to begin. Can you offer me any advice? I've dropped 20% in traffic in the last 8 months. Hope you can help, Adam
Link Building | | NaescentAdam0 -
How long does it take for spam link building to take effect?
I saw a recent surge of a low quality website to the top of SERPS, and looking at the link profile is almost 5,000 newly acquired linking RD's, with a total of over 49,000 links. I looked at a bunch of the links and they are super spammy (foreign language, way unrelated and out of context, spam sites with garbage content, pages of paid links to the websites subpages, etc). My question is, how long does it take for Google to recognize this and penalize this shady site?
Link Building | | Joes_Ideas0 -
Back Link: Is LinkedIn keywords in profile good Link building strategy?
I distribute industrial products B2B with e commerce. I have a personal profile on LinkedIn. I listed the products I sell and I could have all my partners and associates list my web site on their profiles. Do search engines review LinkedIn personal profiles or company profiles and is it a good marketing strategy to have my web site, keywords, and my two largest selling products on LinkedIn?
Link Building | | Wales0 -
Which link should I use for link building?
I have an article which have high rank on Google. But recent, I use mod rewrite url so this article have new url. old: mywebsite.com/c1/p-1 new: mywebsite.com/c-e/p-1 Now, google is indexing old url. I want to ask when I build linking to my site, which link should I use for link building? I should build linking for new url or old url. Thanks
Link Building | | sonzin13040 -
Link Building strategy between domains I own?
I am in the somewhat unique position of owning and administering around 300 websites that each have their own unique domain names. We have a corporate website and then many individual websites for hospitals and nursing centers that we operate. My question is how would you recommend using these sites to build good incoming links between all the sites? Should I take every opportunity to find as many places to link from each site to all the other sites that are owned? Is there anything I should avoid that Google would penalize me for or discount the links all together? Sorry this is a such as long question... but wasn't sure where to start. Thanks!
Link Building | | KHCreative0 -
Link building tools/sites
I am looking for a way to share my content in multiple locations to build back links without having to upload one at a time per location. For example- if i write an article and i upload it to ezine articles and then post it over on my blog- it will then post over on my twitter and facebook and linked in. However- how i can also get this article with back links into shared sites, bookmark sites, and other locations online to help build my inbound marketing for back links. I'm trying to find a way to save time while building out the links.
Link Building | | LauraThomas0