Cemper 🎓 What does "relevancy" of links mean to you? 3 👍🏽 3 [filtered from 28 💬🗨]
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Dolby How relevant and helpful a link is to another page to the user.
Cemper ✍️🎓 » Dolby can you expand on the word relevant? Lund » Dolby Can I try and ask the same time? I'd you read article A and gets a link to Article B – which you find interesting/relevant for what you are searching for, then it's relevant? Think in terms of, will people click this link and how many, 1%, 5%, 25%, 50% or 100%? Dolby » Cemper Not sure if this is a trick question, but anything further information relating to the intent of the original article? An example might be [flooding in New Hampshire risk] – a news article talking about increased risk of flooding in the area with two links pointing to a flood risk zipcode checker might be deemed as more relevant than a link to cheap used cars. My personal test is to ask myself if I'd be comfortable recommending that website to someone who asked me for advice on the topic of that page in person. Dolby » Lund I think that's a 'it depends' – mainly on the CTR of that link article A. These can boil down to a combination of on-page factors such as prominence of the link, number of other links (or 'options'), does article A already solve the problem and is the link clear enough. Cemper ✍️🎓 » Dolby your personal test is what we call the "Google smell test",.i.e. would you have a story to tell a.google engineer about that link being there Dolby » Cemper Exactly – I've never built links for my own sites – instead I've always focused on building a useful site so that people will naturally link to – seems to work and chatting to Google engineers about that tactic seems to go down well. But I've created my fair share of disavow files for clients full of links which wouldn't pass that smell test. Oh, I was about to paste a link to one of the best articles I've ever read about the caveats of modern link building but realised you're the author! "10 Ways your Link Building Agency can Scam You, and probably does" – wow! 💟1 Cemper ✍️🎓 » Dolby yes, and I wrote it "on the side" of navigating and commenting 400 comments last Thursday, while doing link audits of crap link examples I got. Dolby » Cemper lol! Great article, it really got me thinking about how authority metrics from SEO tools can be misread and are such a red-herring.
Jonathan The page your link is on can have site level relevancy, page level relevancy, or sentence/paragraph level relevancy. Having all three is the ideal but you only need 1 out of 3. For example, if you're promoting an article about gardening for your e-commerce gardening website, ideally you'd want an article on another gardening site (or a shoulder niche of gardening like landscaping, tree care, etc) which would cover site level relevancy. If your link on this site is in an article about a gardening topic that would be page level, and in a sentence/paragraph about gardening would cover the lowest level of relevancy.
Cemper ✍️🎓 » Jonathan thanks, identical with my old original 2005 definition from the 2009 Golden Rules of Link Building. heard that in Matt 15 link vetting rules, and I think in the Link Building basics post from Ahrefs last week… Need to expand on it with examples and insights from the past 12 years
Reddy In my opinion there is very little value to relevancy of links over authority, cnet ranks for best dating sites , best web hosting , best whatever you type 🙂 you can find similar pattern with other huge websites lately, so in starting to think higher authority of domain wins over lower authority of domain with exactly relevant links.
Cemper ✍️🎓 » Reddy your seem to be talking about domains and their rankings, when the question was about relevancy of links Reddy » Cemper Ahh you right, I kinda misread the question.
Phil Closely matching "content vectors" at the site, page or paragraph level.
Cemper ✍️🎓 » Phil do you have some sources to describe content vectors? Post a link if you have, if a mod calls it "promotional", I will review and discuss with them. Phil » Cemper actually that one should have been described as "my theory". Sorry I'm usually good at labeling my suspicions vs what I know for certain.. However, specifically answering your question, look up word2vec on Youtube, which is an earlier system for helping language processing. I don't know we're 100% certain that's used in Google's current Natural Language Processing (NLP) system but I still think it's a useful mental model. Cemper ✍️🎓 » Phil no worries. Wordnet is a 20 year old tech that I used back then in Affiliate sites to rewrite content automatically.. …they use Word vectors, and there are other libraries like Word2Vec that touch on this as well Phil » Cemper yes I just updated my comment to mention word2vec. I've just woken up and my brain isn't all there yet 😂
Ammon Johns 🎓 Good question. To me, a link is relevant if it seems natural in the context of the text. Not a forced link, and not irrelevant to the reader (even if it is a little bit of an aside to the main thrust of the content/topic). For example, if in this comment I were to talk about how a book I always recommend to people in regard to earning good links is 'Purple Cow' by Seth Godin, and I made that a link to the book on Good Reads or Amazon, then despite that book not being directly about links, or relevancy, or even SEO, it is still a relevant link, and a good one. However, if I were to tell you that while writing this comment I was drinking my coffee that I made in my favourite percolator that I bought from Amazon, and included a link, then that's a lot less relevant, even if the previous link had gone to Amazon. It's simply more of a stretch from the *reader's* intent and interest, and so less relevant to their needs and interests. That second link still isn't completely irrelevant though, because within the specific context of an Search Engine Optimization (SEO) group, little insights into the lives of a so-called 'famous' SEO can still be of interest to people, and we SEO users do generally have a high interest in good coffee from all those late night jobs where the inspiration has taken us, but we need the caffeine to keep going. Now, did you notice how the last paragraph above actually increased the relevancy of the hypothetical link to the percolator on Amazon? That's relevancy. 💟👍🏽2 Cemper ✍️🎓 Thanks everyone – I really appreciate your feedback and help in definition and examples. Ammon Johns your example really beats everything for me, so I'm going to use it and credit you. 💟1
