Can any of you point me to some actual evidence that there is some sort of non-relevant link penalty or degradation when you are being linked to by a "non-relevant" site? Once again, when I begin to research who is ranking at the very top for most competitive keywords, those sites appear to have a lot of non-relevant links pointing to their sites. Typically high pr links with good anchor text. Looks like it is working for them. So, does anyone actually have any evidence of non-relevant links being bad currently? All I have seen is speculation so far, and anticipation of what may happen.
I don't think there is any 'penalty' per se, more that the links are not valued as strong as a themed link. From what I've gathered, things such as the overall theme of the website, the page title the link is on, and the surrounding text all play a factor in relevancy. Pagerank would be transferred the same regardless of relevancy, but a serps boost would not.
Non relevant links are fine and do help you to an extent. However a problem could arise if you had 50 relevant links and then went out and got 400 non relevant links (maybe by buying some sitewide links). This might confuse the search engines and your site would not be as targeted towards its niche as before. This is mainly speculation but it makes sense.
It makes absolute sense and shows how smaller less-authority sites like a lot of ours could suffer at the hands of an uncrupulous person who wishes to damage our sites rankings. Since Google don't take this matter seriously enough (There is /almost/ nothing anyone can do to influence your rankings springs to mind) .. our sites, rankings and earnings are at the whim of anyone who wishes to fuck them over. Hooray. Pete
Thanks ferret77. I haven't been at this long, but it doesn't take a whole lot of intelligence to look at who is ranking and what they are doing. Then, see that this is NOT what the seo experts are telling us. I have many more questions about seo and linking, and I appreciate your honest answers so far. DP is an amazing place.
You'd be surprised lsample. A lot of people put blinders on to stuff - they think things don't work because they don't want them to work. Irrelevant links are a good example. Instead of testing stuff, people just decide that it's morally wrong somehow and that because they don't want them to work, they don't. That happens all over the place. You can obviously have more nuanced positions on the issue (i.e., they work but relevant links are much better) but a lot of people tend to decide something is right or wrong without ever trying it out. Another thing to remember is that many SEO's are people who work exclusively on the web sites of others. That's fine and all, and some of them are very good at it, but the correllary of that is that if you're doing SEO for others you don't know how to make as much money working on your own sites. If they're doing SEO for big companies and big paychecks, then that makes sense - they're smart people who give more value to the big company than they could produce on their own. But a lot of people have sort of flooded into the field (and written a lot of articles on it) who don't know much about what is going on or who write their articles to take a position they think will attract them more business.
also many people take positions that somehow help them financially, and sometimes SEOs purposely mislead newbies to hamstring them, not much on this forum though
This is a great topic. The problem is the extreme White hat seo side of things does make sense...until you see who is actually ranking and making the big money. I have no plans on starving just to preserve some artifical ideology made up by very conservative webmasters / seo's. Brandon
relevant links are better for driving traffic but I have to say that the case for relevant links from an SE point of view is definately weak. I use to be a relevant link advocate but my sites with only relevant links got smacked in the last two updates. I lost enough revenue that I said screw this and just got a ton of links. I got a lot of my positions back not to mention it took me a fraction of the time it took to get "relevant" ones. Obviously Matt Cutts and Google are going to preach relevancy but they are just a little bit biased