I received a question by email about our
Contextual Links service.
Quote:
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If there is any possibility that our link will be placed on a site that is not related … I'm really not that interested.
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My response:
Let me first go on a rant about “related” and then answer your question.
My blog, which I rarely update, is
www.internet-marketing-blog.com
It is supposedly about Internet marketing. However, as most blogs are, I tend to write about and link to sites about other topics. Example:
http://www.internet-marketing-blog.c...ijin-in-japan/
Google likes to get people to think that sites are about certain topics, and
only certain topics. I think it’s BS myself. Digg, for example, covers pretty much every topic under the sun. And it is legit. The more tightly restricted a blog is, the more it has a tendency to be NOT legit. In my experience, and I have a lot of it, the best blogs are actually personal blogs. Take Matt Cutts blog for example. He blogs about SEO, Google, employment, travel, music, TV, food, technology, etc.
When I get links for my own sites, I tell my staff to get them from personal blogs, because those are the most legit, blogs. Legit blogs have organic link popularity. They have organic link popularity from a number of legit sources on a number of topics.
And when I ask for relevance I ask for it in the form of my keywords in the title of the blog post. If I am targeting “best widgets”, I want “widgets” in the blog post title.
And you know what? Within days of placing those organic-appearing links, my pages are moving up in the SERPs. In fact, with as little as 5 blog links, I’ve moved pages into the top five on Google for competitive keywords, above other sites that are buying site wide links with the exact anchor text of the terms I am targeting.
It shocked even me to see that non-topical blogs ( personal blogs) had that much pull in the SERPs. It is SEO like we did it 4 years ago, except that instead of buying site wide links or footer links for hundreds of dollars a month, we are spending $20 a pop and getting better results. Remember, I am no stranger to link buying. At one time I was spending $10,000 per month renting links on a monthly basis, and had several PR8’s because of it.
In my opinion, the Google algorithm is less about affirmative elements such as relevancy – relevancy being a figment of Google’s imagination – and more about link filtering. For example, footer links. You can test that by placing a link in the footer of a page to page A, and placing a link above the fold/content to page “B” with the same anchor text. I can assure you, all things being equal, page “B” will get the link juice.
Google’s relevancy is about as real as Ted Kennedy’s integrity. Same goes for “neighborhoods”. Well, maybe that is not entirely accurate. I should just say that relevancy doesn’t play as big a role in the algorithm as they would like you to believe.
To prove my point, do a search for “Britney Spears Naked”. Within a day or two of Peter Da Vanzo posting this blog post -
http://blog.v7n.com/2006/12/04/britney-spears-naked/ - it was ranked at #3 for that search term. We are not actively targeting that search term. We haven’t bought a single link to that page, nor have we asked for a single link for that page, but we rank #6 and #7 for that search term, which by the way drives a huge amount of traffic.
Other sites are actually relevant to that search term. They are buying links, spamming links and trying their best to get ranked for that search term, but Google , in their infinite wisdom, has decided that v7n has two pages that are relevant enough to be ranked in the top ten for that search term.
Is v7n relevant to that search term? Forget v7n, is the subdomain
blog.v7n.com relevant to that search term? No! Not unless Google and Pay Per Click and all that is somehow related to Britney Spears being nude.
If Google had the slightest idea what relevancy was, v7n wouldn’t be anywhere for the search term Britney Spears naked.
Having said that, if you really, really want links on only employment related blogs and no personal blogs, you can specify that in your order and we will honor that request.