Authority or Relevence?

[seanmccauley]

Example:

Let's say I sell whiteboard markers (I don't) and I have a chance to get a link from one of these pages: Assume all anchor text is the same

-A PA 70 page about a completely unrelated topic (not a directory, or a spammy site, let's say it's a friend's blog for example)

-A PA 30 page about office supplies, that maybe mentions whiteboard markers once.

-A PA 18 page that is ALL ABOUT whiteboard markers - they live and breathe whiteboard markers and their entire blog is about them.

If, hypothetically, you had a choice of only one of the three which will give the biggest boost in rankings?

Is it all about DA/PA or would a fairly low authority but HIGHLY RELEVANT link be better?

[MBayes]

I'd go for the one with the best DJ passed.

[RyanKent]

I like the question and I agree with the responses except for one problem...we are all guessing. SEO involves a lot of guessing but we are really stretching on this one. It would be nice if SEOmoz or another group with the resources could do some testing in this and other areas to determine the answer.

Any company with access to sites with varying domain and page authority could create test links to another site and help find the answers to questions like this one.

[seanmccauley]

As would I - it's the obvious choice -  I just wanted to get a feeling for peoples thoughts on how worthy relevancy is.

[IKT]

I dont have a theory for my choice, but if i were you, i would have picked the PA 70 page for sure

[dignan99]

Although not the question, I believe we would go for all three sites.

While I agree with Dejan, there is always a decent chance that Google and other search engines may begin to understand the relevancy in relationship to the site in question.  It hasn't happened yet, but we only need a "Hulkster" Google update to change that, if you know what I mean.

[Dan-Petrovic]

I thought long about what to answer here and if I really put myself in the situation I would go for the juiced up domain as the first choice. Why? Most of my testing shows that search engines are not that great at picking up relevance and sites with completely unrelated but diverse and strong link portfolios still rank really well.

Would I base my entire link building strategy on this principle? Absolutely not.