The question for today comes from John Smith, who is based in Canada. He inquires as to which is more beneficial:
- a link from a website that is highly relevant to the topic
- a connection from a highly regarded and trusted website
THE EDUCATOR’S RESPONSE
This is a challenging question to answer without learning the subject matter of the authoritative or relevant website in question.
So, let’s break down the question even more specifically.
An effective link comes from a website that is extremely relevant, extremely dependable and can be found on a quality service like Link-Guru.com. Those links have a high level of conceptually related content. Any mixture of those things is likely to be beneficial to you in some way as well if not all.
Although only the official PageRank is provided publicly, this just symbolizes a transfer of value from one page to another with a dampening element thrown in for good measure. In addition, it does not take into consideration the keywords that are used in the link text, the worth of the source domain, the validity transmitter that is noticed on both the sender and receiver pages or any of the other aspects that we can only speculate influence the result value of a link.
If you’d like to learn more about Google’s patent, you can find it in the company’s official application.
THE PRECAUTIONS
While taking into consideration the mathematical calculation above, one must also take into account the possibility that the PageRank will be immediately rejected at the source or destination of the link.
Some of the signs that could enable an otherwise high-quality link to be disregarded include the following but are not limited to them:
- An x-robots tag specifying nofollow for all links on a webpage or domain
- A 302 redirect is used to reroute the user between the source page and the destination page
- If the link source contains a nofollow trait, the link will be ignored.
- Canonical, rel alternative, or hreflang tags directing to a page that limits links in any way or that is not properly reciprocated are all examples of broken links.
- A robots.txt directive to prevent the page from being indexed by search engines If the destination page cannot be rendered due to a 4xx error or a 5xx problem, the page will not be displayed.
- On the source page, there is a nofollow directive.
- Any type of noindex directive on the target page
- If Google rejects it because they believe it is sponsored
- A sequence of redirect that surpasses the authorized number of redirects
Any type of link authoritative evaluation must be free of a large number of negative indicators that can have an impact on the final link rating before it can be used. If you need some assistance making sure that all of these indicators are in sync, this post by Glenn Gabe does an excellent job and also includes some useful tools.
THE SOLUTION IN THE MARKETING FIELD
You might have been getting a little confused by all of the information presented above. In the following events, that you are looking for ties and partnerships, you will find that you are successful.
- Extremely authoritative
- Extremely applicable
- Topically connected
Any link that drives high-quality traffic to your website is good, regardless of whether it is nofollowed, untrustworthy, or not particularly useful.
A very relevant link can be just as beneficial as a highly authoritative link; the difference is that they work in different ways.
EXTREMELY AUTHORITATIVE
What is the best way to tell if a link is very authoritative?
The majority of links with high authority will be visible. They will come from well-known sources such as online news websites or review websites, as well as from well-known professionals in a certain sector.
It is usually beneficial to receive links from high-profile websites like BBC, LA Times, or other famous news. Similar to this, even if you do not work in the technology area, a connection from a site such as Gizmodo or TechCrunch is beneficial. Regardless of their specific field, all of these websites have huge influences generally.
The task becomes a little more difficult when you enter a specialty industry where the authorities aren’t necessarily well-known, but there are still techniques to determine whether a website is authoritative or not.
- Backlinks should be checked using a third-party service. However, keep in mind that just because a website does not have a high “Domain Authority” or “Citation” score does not imply that the site is not worthwhile
- Would you be willing to pay to have your link placed on this website? If that’s the case, others have most likely already done so. Take a look at the other websites that they link to. Do the links appear to be largely nofollow, or do they appear to be using affiliate codes? Would a link from this site to your site appear to be a legitimate connection?
- Practice the odor assessment. Determine whether something is safe. Does the website appear to be legitimate? Is it free of grammatical and spelling errors? Is it apparent that it is focused on a single theme or a succession of linked topics?
This is an excellent opportunity to bring out why I believe it is worthless to look at the individual “page authority” and “domain authority” metrics. I understand that a lot of applications (including Moz) make use of this phrase, but I believe it misses the purpose of what a link is supposed to accomplish.
The following is the purpose of a link:
- Give some background information.
- Identify a topic of interest
- Explain a concept or notion
- Provide additional resources for a particular topic.
The primary purpose of a link should be to increase traffic, with the consequent advantage of link value to search engines.
The practice of evaluating pages based on their link authority completely misses the objective. Because of its low “authority,” a valuable page should not be excluded from links.
EXTREMELY APPLICABLE AND TOPICALLY CONNECTED
Many of the methods used to determine whether or not a website is highly relevant are comparable to the authoritative tests used by search engines.
- Lookup a couple of the folks who are on the site using Google. Are they subject-matter experts in their field? Is there a social media presence for the site that is updated regularly?
- Test your sense of smell. You are aware of whether the website appears to be linked to what you are offering or not. Be completely honest with yourself. It is possible that women traveling will be shopping for stockings for their vacation, but there is no direct linkage between the two, and your stockings website will appear out of place on a local guide. Instead, look for a site that is focused on fashion.
- Search ‘Reviews’. Reviews can be found by searching for the site’s name and the word “reviews.” Is there a lot of negativities around the site? That can occasionally signal that, even though the site is highly important to your business, you do not wish to be linked with the organization in question.
- Test on the subject. If the site appears to be legitimate, are the publications or other content centered on a specific theme or series of topics? If so, what is the focus of the articles or other information? A common finding in this stage is that a website contains content on iPhone cases, prescription diet pills, and SEO tactics all in the same blog post. Typically, this is a strong indicator that the site is not particularly relevant and may even be deemed spam.
The tests described above will be useful, but keep in mind that even a site with no relevant content might occasionally generate a significant quantity of traffic for your site, particularly if the profile of the visitor is comparable.
CONCLUSION
Make an effort to place less emphasis on what defines a “good connection” and more emphasis on the concept of a classic cross-sell. If you can identify sites with a similar client profile to yours, as well as sites with a reasonable amount of link authority and some related content, you will almost always hit the jackpot. Even if the site itself does not affect your website’s ranking, it will increase the amount of traffic that comes to your site.