I'm gonna keep this short. How important are relevant links for SEO? I'm only asking this because my competitors are ranking better than I do - with spammy, totally irrelevant links.
Relevant links are the most important type of links. The search engines want to give weight to links that people would click on and nobody clicks on an irrelevant link. Every website gathers some irrelevant links because people link to websites from all over and webmasters don;t have control over that. But if the webmaster is building links like that you could report them to Google and the site would get it's rankings dropped.
Having relevant backlinks to your site is important, but every link will have value to some extent. So, be sure that YOU are getting relevant links to your site. For long term purposes you want relevant links going to your site. If Google thinks your just adding a ton of sites to boost your rankings your site will not rank well. The site you are talking about may be using strategies to fool Google, but it won't last long. You need to be sure that you are using Great SEO strategies so that once your site gets to the first page, it stays there. Some great basic SEO strategies are : 1. get a keyword rich domain name 2. rich copy/content on your site, ESPECIALLY on the home page. You could ad articles to your website to improve your content relevnancy. 3. Write articles and post them on article sites. But don't use the same articles on Ezine articles as you do on your website unless you rewrite your article content at about 60% or it will be considered spam content because it is repetitive. 3. be sure to fill out the meta tags with keywords that are relevant to that page (only use keywords used to optimize that particular page - the keywords used in the content of that page 3-4%) 4. relevant backlinks that are added slowly - no more than about 28 a day 5 use at least sitemap and SEO Pack plugins on your site if your using a Wordpress site ! Remember your building the SEO for your site long term
Can you give me examples of competitors that have spammy, irrelevant links, and that are outranking you? I could see if I have any intuition as to why this is happening. But keep in mind that SEO is an area in which a lot of the key information is hidden from you. There could be a small number of well-placed links that are helping your competitors. Have you run these competitors through yahoo site explorer? Also, are they older than you? If they are, just sit tight. You will overtake them in time if your site is better and you're using more legitimate techniques to market your site. Also, if a competitor is engaged in a link scheme or other spammy technique, I would not hesitate to report them to google. I've reported sites to google and seen them completely taken out of google's index in as little as 24 hours. Also, if someone is using a blogger or wordpress spam blog to promote their site, you can report to these sites and it will be taken down. Wordpress often takes them down in 3-4 hours or less. This is worth doing because wordpress and blogger are seen as reputable sites, and in the case of wordpress, it sometimes even drives traffic through the tag search and other search results.
To answer your question: Relevant links are the most important for the first layer. In other words, a link from a site about gardening to a site about gardening tools is more powerful than a link from a site about French cuisine to a site about gardening tools.
The important thing about backlinks are that they must be relevant links it should be that the sites that are linking to your site, must be about the same topics to let that backlink count. You definitely see fair amount of traffic coming your way doing this white hat SEO.
relevant links arent the most important ones. links coming from a high trustrank site are much better
Relevant links are very important but they are not the only factor in your rankings. Site age, social relevance, on-page optimsation and many other things also count. Also I've seen cases of Google penalties when too many links with same keywords are used coming from relevant sites but other keywords coming from a diverse range of sites did better. So it's important to mix up your links a bit. I generally don't recommend article marketing, directories, profiles etc as they a bit spammy but they do add some diversity which is good.
a link from a site about gardening to a site about gardening tools is more powerful than a link from a site about French cuisine to a site about gardening tools.
It is quite difficult situation that someone creating links on spammy websites and they are getting good ranking then us. and these links are counted in the backlink of google, but i can't understand the reason why this happen ?
your competitors must have some high pr links in there that are causing their rank to be higher you should look into getting better high pr links possibly i have seen some statments where people use ebay links and such forth to get higher pr links for their site
Have you reported them? Relevant links usually benefit you more than the other links do - they're in your niche, which means, the links are counted more - and if those sites rank, with a lot of indexed pages, you're in for a great road ahead.
Like everything else this gets complicated because that is what people do. They complicate things. But if the truth be told,there is nothing complicated about SEO. It is mostly common sense. Ranking is about targeted back links and you use link directories to do this. If relevancy is an issue, which I don't believe it is, you get all the relevancy you need from the page your link appears on and it makes sense to take a look at the sites editorial guidelines. Or to put it in simple terms ask yourself whether they are listing sites in the right category. If they are it's a good sign. The only other factor you have to consider is how long your link is going to be around. What is the purpose of the site? Are they going to last? That is as complicated as it gets. If however you are networking, building relationships and your online presence then yes, relevancy is important. But that much is common sense. You are looking for traffic. You are looking for credibility, not links. And this is where most people get confused. They for some reason or other do not understand that there is a difference.
Relevant links are better. Much, much better. At the same time, if you use thousands and thousands of spammy irrelevant links you can outrank a modest number of relevant links. Everything balances out, it's just the nature of the algorithm.
Are you saying that a link with anchor text from a travel blog that makes a post about an engineering company in a small town is not going to count as much as the same link from an industry related blog? If so why? How do you define relevance? How do you put this to the test? Have you put it to the test? Or are you just echoing what Matt said? We have been building links for years and general directories work just fine in the serps's. Do you agree that you get relevance from the category where you post? Much, much better for what? Networking or link building? You make a very bold sweeping statement.