Understanding relevant links
You will often read learned discussion regarding the relevancy of anchor text links, with some saying that without relevant links you cannot rank well, and others saying in effect that a link is link is a link. We cannot say with a high degree of certainty that either side is correct but personally I tend to lean to the link is a link school.
Relevant links - Fact or Fiction?
Most discussions about relevant links make the assumption that a relevant link has to satisfy all or some of the following conditions:
- The anchor text in the link has to match the subject of the page the link points to.
- The subject of the page that contains the link should be on topic with either the page it points to or the anchor text or both.
- Some even say that the links that point to the page which contains the link have to be relevant to the link and/or the page it points to.
Search engines greatest objective is to provide relevant results to search terms, and given that as the primary objective it appears to me that determining the relevancy of a link can be very difficult as only the person who placed the link really knows what the intent of placing the link was. :Lets say that I happen to like a particular brand of pizza so much that I put up bit of text on this site singing the praises of this pizza, This seems to me to be a very relevant link but it fails all the tests set forth above.
Lets look at another example, suppose I buy a nice new Jaguar auto (I should be so lucky) and because I got a great price for a great car I put up a link to the dealer who sold it to me. Is this not a relevant link? Now suppose that the distributor who provides this dealer with Jaguars puts up a link to the same site - is this a more relevant link just because it came from an automotive site? Or perhaps its a worse link because the distributor has a financial interest in the dealer selling more Jaguars?
I believe that these simple examples show that the determination of relevancy is not an easy thing to do with any degree of accuracy. The most common idea of relevancy is that the site the link comes from should be on the same general topic, but unless and until search engines have much more powerful algorithms and hardware than they do today, even this method is too inaccurate and time consuming to be of practical value,
Using relevant links
It is also clear that if search engines were able to use the relevancy of the sites that links come from as a weighting factor in their algo it might help increase the relevancy of the rankings, or at the very least make it harder to game the algo. For this reason if for no other it may be well to include as many links from relevant sites as is convenient, just in case future improvements in algorithms and search engine hardware make it possible to use, but I would not recommend spending too much time on this aspect of linking at this time.
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