Hi

so is it a myth about "contextual" blog links being on relevant sites being more powerful?

So I am a car dealer is a contextual link on a PR4 car site more powerful than a non car site PR4 link?

Then again how can G. possibly filter that?

Thx

I don't think so. How would G know what is relevant to a certain topic. Nearly everything can be relevant to another topic. And even if it is not relevant today it is maybe tomorrow.

Nevertheless i think contextual high pr links work good .

Well, some say it's a myth, some say it's not, if you google SEO and look at the backlinks of the top ten, around 80-90% of their backlinks have 'SEO' in the <title> tag, that's an argument for relevancy.

I've heard some people on here saying relevancy doesn't matter too though.

By the way, the best possible backlink you can have is:

• on a trusted website (no 'blog networks', no garbage spun content)
• contextual within a post (not 'sitewide' or in the sidebar)
• live when the page is first crawled (not a comment or added in later)
• natural anchor text within a sentence (not a blatant exact match keyword)
• on a page that has a social 'buzz' around it (likes, +1's, tweets & retweets)
• totally different and original design of the overall website compared to yours
• different a class IP/host/nameservers/whois data to yours
• on a site that has plenty of google traffic
• it makes sense to have a link on a site related to yours, although it's contested

Crumbs....yeah i think G could add weigth to "relevant" sites. I am sure they can filter that.

Thx
By the way, the best possible backlink you can have is:

on a trusted website (no 'blog networks', no garbage spun content)
contextual within a post (not 'sitewide' or in the sidebar)
live when the page is first crawled (not a comment or added in later)
natural anchor text within a sentence (not a blatant exact match keyword)
on a page that has a social 'buzz' around it (likes, +1's, tweets & retweets)
totally different and original design of the overall website compared to yours
different a class IP/host/nameservers/whois data to yours
on a site that has plenty of google traffic
it makes sense to have a link on a site related to yours, although it's contested

No one would know for sure..People are just guessing. Of course any pR4 link would add weight contextual or not.

Contextual links are always powerfull weather on niche related or not .
BTW if are in niche related then you can get some good traffic too from that page and on non niche it will increase rankings and you will get traffic through Search engines

Originally Posted by mishti

No one would know for sure..People are just guessing. Of course any pR4 link would add weight contextual or not.

and the pr4 link would have more weight if it was there since the page was pr0/freshly indexed.

I don't think search engines are as complex as Google likes to make you think they are.

Look at the results of Google and Yahoo for any search term and notice how remarkably similar they are.

Now, either Bing happened to copy 200 factors almost perfectly from Google, and this accounts for the similarity, or Google is still 99% reliant on random backlinks just like it was in 1997.

And if you haven't seen what JC Penney did at the beginning of 2011, this basically proves that search engines aren't any more complex than they were in the 1990s; the index was just a lot smaller due to less activity and no Web 2.0 or social media "realtime" pages.

Google uses pseudo-communist style propaganda using the face of Matt Cutts to tell everyone "work at creating the best high quality content and hope that people will magically link to it over time, because content is king now."

This is used to cover up the fact that Google doesn't have any ideas for getting rid of a flawed system, so they try to brainwash people into believing geting rankings in Google is all about what they ideally would like it to be about.

I really dont know how their algorithm works, but I can confidently say that

contextual links on relevant blogs are more powerful.

I was able to rank a brand new website with just 8 guest posts on relevant websites, just imagine that!

All my testing points to the fact that they are a little better, but much of the time it makes very little difference...

The bigger question being, can you get more links to stick by using varied content, rather than sticking to one genre!

I've found that by using massively varied topics, I'm able to produce considerably more volume of original content and links, and this therefore completely outweighs any benefit from 'relevant themed' sources.

Also; the algorithms to parse content into themes/memes are incredibly complex; and although it's easy to believe that Google has unlimited power; they don't have the computational power to properly LSI even 1% of the web, let alone all of it; so they have to use simpler methods; basically word-relevance grouping, and very simple language parsing.

This means that the majority of the time, you'll get as much juice from a 'relevant' PR4, as you will from an off-theme one. I've tracked data around this subject now for nearly 5 years across tens of thousands of domains and hundreds of thousands of keywords; as I do large scale SEO for some big customers. And I've yet to find any concrete evidence that theme-relevance makes any significant difference to the power of a link; there's always some other factor at play. Google is NOT as clever as many think.

Everybody has their own theories as to how Google rewards or punishes websites. Who knows what's exactly correct..perhaps Google itself doesn't even know :P

Nonetheless, as long as your producing high quality links, you won't be PUNISHED for it. if you lose ranking, it can be simply because you're being spammy or other people in your market are working harder than you are at SEO. Don't always blame Google

Originally Posted by jascoken

All my testing points to the fact that they are a little better, but much of the time it makes very little difference...

The bigger question being, can you get more links to stick by using varied content, rather than sticking to one genre!

I've found that by using massively varied topics, I'm able to produce considerably more volume of original content and links, and this therefore completely outweighs any benefit from 'relevant themed' sources.

Also; the algorithms to parse content into themes/memes are incredibly complex; and although it's easy to believe that Google has unlimited power; they don't have the computational power to properly LSI even 1% of the web, let alone all of it; so they have to use simpler methods; basically word-relevance grouping, and very simple language parsing.

This means that the majority of the time, you'll get as much juice from a 'relevant' PR4, as you will from an off-theme one. I've tracked data around this subject now for nearly 5 years across tens of thousands of domains and hundreds of thousands of keywords; as I do large scale SEO for some big customers. And I've yet to find any concrete evidence that theme-relevance makes any significant difference to the power of a link; there's always some other factor at play. Google is NOT as clever as many think.

Good points, the arguments that are for relevance could merely be coincidence, of course it's likely that SEO sites will get backlinks from other SEO sites, that makes sense, but the argument that relevance increases the power of the links isn't proven.

But like somebody said above, if you get a link on a related site that has a lot of great traffic, then you're likely to get some of that traffic and it will be higher quality visitors than from a totally unrelated site. This is the main benefit of related links for me.