Link Building: The Importance of Relevance

Last Updated on: 11th November 2023, 08:00 pm

Despite the growing importance of social signals and the occasional clueless nutter claiming that “SEO is dead”, links still play a massive role in rankings. In fact, Matt Cutts (head of webspam at Google) recently said this in an interview with Eric Enge:

“Links are still the best way that we’ve found to discover (how relevant or important somebody is) and maybe, over time, social or authorship or other types of markup will give us a lot more information about that.”

So there we have it. It was all about the links 10 years ago, and it’s all about the links now.

But things have changed. In fact, things have changed so much that many SEO agencies have closed down; and people that were making thousands with SEO before, are now struggling to get by.

But don’t let this fact scare you. It came about mostly because many SEOs were unable to change their tactics when the algorithm changed.

One of the things that the algorithm has changed is the importance of relevance. Rewind 10 years and one link basically equalled one vote. It didn’t matter where the link was placed.

Then Google changed things up by introducing page rank, and making it so that all links were not equal, meaning that links from certain places had dramatically different effects to your site’s rankings.

In its current state, Google can not only assign levels of authority to links from certain sites, but it can also alter the power of a link based on the theme of the site.

In short, your site about real estate is going to see ridiculously better results with a link from a site about real estate, rather than a site about web design.

So with that being said, when it comes to link building, it makes sense to make a bigger effort to acquire links from sites that are similar in theme to your site.

You will see far better results.

Just a quick one for today, let me know your thoughts below.

Daniel

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