Comments on: Get high rankings by building authoritative, irrelevant links?

By: richardbaxterseo

richardbaxterseo — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 22:14:31 +0000

Good to know! Glad you found this post useful…

By: Cichlid

Cichlid — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 22:12:59 +0000

We just had a huge discussion at work about irrelevant links getting discounted by search engines. Thats great info and confirms what I’ve said. Thank you.

By: mark rushworth

mark rushworth — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 15:53:18 +0000

did you ever get around to quantifying relevancy? nice work dude.

By: richardbaxter

richardbaxter — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 15:14:10 +0000

No problem! Good to have you on board (excuse the pun…)

By: Mike Evans

Mike Evans — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 14:28:49 +0000

It will be interesting to return to this page in three years time and to see whether anything is still relevant, I suspect new ways of ranking will be brought in, just as mere mortals like myself have got the hang of backlinks and quality website structure

By: Malcolm Lambe

Malcolm Lambe — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 19:27:27 +0000

Sorry. It's here – http://www.warriorforum.com/adsense-ppc-seo-discu...

Didn't go far. Needs more to join in. cheers, Mal.

By: Next SEO

Next SEO — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 16:07:18 +0000

Hi,

Your post is great and your conclusions are really impresive.

thanks for sharing with us.

By: Top Rankings SEO

Top Rankings SEO — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 03:18:20 +0000

Thanks for this, this confirms my findings of sites in very competative niches achieving top rankings with VERY irrelevant but also very authoritative links.

By: Marietta Roof Repair

Marietta Roof Repair — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 18:31:55 +0000

Angela (think angela's link pkg) has been clainming this for awhile. Your conclusions prove she is on the right track.

By: Gustav Pursche

Gustav Pursche — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 11:03:40 +0000

Very good post – thanks for your researches!

By: richardbaxterseo

richardbaxterseo — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 16:24:09 +0000

Hi Jonny, I’m planning to do exactly that in another post for the future. Thanks for the reminder!

By: Jonny Scott

Jonny Scott — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 16:20:25 +0000

Thanks for sharing. Out of interest, any reason why you did not bring Majestic SEO into this analysis?

By: Combson's Yachts

Combson's Yachts — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 19:03:43 +0000

Regular articles and combined linkbuilding techniques is all you need. Commenting on other people's blogs is very useful as they tend to comment to your blog and spread throught your network sometimes… Natural linking occurs slow but builds up with time, and if you are serious about your work and blog, you will succeed.

I have subscribed to your RSS by the way…

By: Jen

Jen — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 18:18:00 +0000

Great post.!
Relevance is only a part of the equation and a highly over-rated one at that. I look forward to your further analysis of relevance. Because I believe that relevance is an equation in and of itself.

By: richardbaxter

richardbaxter — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 16:33:16 +0000

Thanks Malcolm, where's the link to that? I'll join in the conversation….

By: Malcolm Lambe

Malcolm Lambe — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 12:59:37 +0000

You can look forward to some lively debate on this. I've just linked to you from the Internet marketing Forum "Warrior Forum". But we'll never know the definitive answer to this will we? Then SEO would be all too easy.

By: SEO Chiangmai

SEO Chiangmai — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 03:59:17 +0000

Excellent work. Empirical data, though a single case, really helps provide the insight needed to best serve the customer. I also believe that "expertise" as one aspect of relevance is about who considers you an expert, and then the "subject matter" of which one is an expert is based more on content in a vector-space model and the linking between similar expert vector-space comparisons. Thanks!

By: richardbaxterseo

richardbaxterseo — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 13:33:12 +0000

Hi Dave, thanks for dropping by! Just a quick note on the relevancy count – the 5th graph (expressed as a percentage) is calculated from the Linkscape data, so we're talking a relevancy count in the first few thousand links rather than just the top 100. Either way, totally agree with what you say – in this particular niche, it would be reasonable to assume you could own the top ranking by out-linkbuilding these guys with value AND relevance.

By: Blue Word Maker

Blue Word Maker — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 13:27:13 +0000

Authority links are always helpful… but too often, authority can't be secured without $, whether through press release distribution or paid links.

Relevant links should generally be easier to come by as a niche blog or site tries to develop its authority, but relevant sites that aren't direct competition tend to lack overall authority.

With link building, IMO, if you have a natural looking profile with a combination of all types of links, you're going to get rankings. No matter how easy you try to make it, link building is still going to require the tedious work of – that's right – building links. Just get ready to buckle down and get to it.

By: Dave Snyder

Dave Snyder — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 21:25:47 +0000

I don't think its an all or nothing concept.

A site, in order to rank well, needs to have links from a number of places, and links that have various attributes.

Power links, the ones being classified here are important, and it is why we leverage social media for our clients. How else are you going to get a link from the BBC naturally if you are not a big brand?

Relevant links are there too, as I am sure they are with the sites tested here outside of the top 100 links tested here.

And anchor text, should be varied naturally, but focused anchor text should still be in the mix.

As SEOs, we are too often looking for the silver bullet. A+B=C. The reality looks more like the drake equation.