Non relevant links ?

does exchanging link with non relevent sites have any affect on rankings ? posotive or negative ?

 

I guess there is only minimal plus to those links according to their PR.

 

There is no negative effect from doing this, otherwise it would be too easy to hurt your competitor.

 

I agree.

While you will receive minimal benefits, most likely it won't hurt you at all.

It could be a waste of time, does that count as a big negative? (You could look for 1 relevant link instead of 10 irrelevant ones and you would probably be better off with rankings for your keywords)

 

For me the time needed to get a link that isn't relevant is a negative effect. Could also have a negative effect if you have to many sites linking to you from "Bad Neighborhoods"

 

There must be a big "magic" dictionary to determine relevant links? I'm not sure how this is supposed to work in practice in the SE's algorithms.

Eric

 

Relevancy of links is easy to determine. The search engine simply matches the keywords in the title, body and anchors of the referring page to those on the site it links to. If a page about 'blue widgets' links to another page on 'blue widgets', then this is clearly a relevant link. If it were to link to 'knitting', then the link would be counted as irrelevant.

Cryo.

 

The most negative point would be that it would be a total waste of your time and also serves no use for your visitors.

 

It could only be a negative experience, nothing positive can come out of non-relavant links.

 

yes but you may get few visitors from non relevant links ? for example if you exchange link with site with 10000 monthly visitors , there are good chances that you may get 500 visitors from his site (provided that he gives link of your site on his index page) . ? because traffic from other sites is second largest source of any website traffic after search engine traffic .

 

Yes, that's true, but isn't that called something like blind traffic?

What I am saying is that it's very low quality traffic, probably not interested at all in the linked website, maybe just curious or brought to click with no gret intention.

To get interest from that sort of clients, you might end up spending more for bandwidth that actual benefits.

OK, BW is cheaper and cheaper, still, is worth the effort overall?

 

for more on this, go to google video, and search for the "google factory tour" video. It gives, among other things, a detailed presentation of how google knows which words are related to others.

Its a FIVE hour long video, and enough to make a non-techie kill themselves. Otherwise, im sure that most here will find it very interesting.

bah, i'll do the work and just give you the URL

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3383042311441257769&q=google+factory+tour

In short - google has tables upon tables upon tables upon tables of how words are related. it uses these for the "did you mean" feature, and for helping it decide on what results to show for a word or series of words.