I received this short post about link building relevancy and I could not agree more. Read this post from aweber and send me any questions you have about link building and boosting your online presence.
Years ago, having thousands of inbound links, whether or not they were reciprocal or relevant was the way to go for good page ranking. And while inbound links are still a very important factor in your site’s over all value, sophistication in search algorithms suggests you be more selective in your link building activities.
If we were to sum up everything going on in search these days and put it into one word, that word would be Relevancy. Site value is all about that, regardless if its content, domain name, keywords, or inbound links. Everything centers around how relevant a site is throughout its individual parts.
In fact, if you own a blog, even the comments should be relevant to the content its posted on, which is why most blogging platforms allow you to moderate incoming comments to make it so.
Relevancy is everything!
It not only makes it easier for your site to get indexed and gives visitors an idea of what to expect, but it also gives you the opportunity to become part of a global discussion on your topic.
When they talk about “link juice” this is what they’re referring to.
You see, a link on any site is just a link. You get some weight from the back link, but nothing really significant so as to send your page rank soaring. Eventually, if you get enough of these, and we’re talking thousands, you may get a bump in your ranking if your site is well optimized and doesn’t give the index bots any grief.
However, if you can get some “juice” out of your link building efforts by joining a relevant world wide conversation, then you’ll have something!
Now this doesn’t mean you have to comment on every relevant blog in the universe, although it certainly will help a lot to contribute to some posts whether you’re pro or con on what they write. (A little disagreement never hurt any discussion.)
But when you do contribute like this, you put your site into the mix, and so their site and yours becomes a circle of life feeding each other traffic and link love from the search engines.
Everyone tries to speculate what the search engines are up to, but it’s really very simple. They want to make connections. They want to connect people who use them to what they’re searching for, and they want to connect results to other results to give people as much information as possible.
The easier you make it for them, the more they’ll love your site.
Value, for the search engines, has to do with how long a chain they can create by tying sites together. Links linking with links, and more links for good measure. Enough links, and you get a huge “punch bowl” full of relevant juice. And if your links are in that bowl, then you benefit.
On the other hand, just as with certain words like “the,” “and” and the like being considered “stops” for the index bots, which they won’t index and skip over, so too irrelevant and non-contributing comments are seen as stops, and likewise skipped over. Which is why most sites need thousands of back links to even put a dent in their page ranking.
But if you’re being selective in your link building, and only connect with relevant sites where you can contribute relevant thoughts, you won’t need hardly as many back links to make a difference. So the global social party is on, the punch bowl is filling up with juice, and just waiting for you to add yours. Just remember not to throw any pits in it.
Stay Relevant!
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