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Baking relevance, the most misunderstood recipe in SEO

Posted by Michael Martinez on March 28, 2007 in SEO Theory

Search engine optimizers talk about relevance very casually these days. They seem to be fixated on relevant links, however, rather than actual relevance. Relevant links don’t help you very much. In fact, relevant links can hurt you.

A few years ago when the SEO industry was still young and small business owners were flooding forums with requests for help, I often advised them to seek out links from industry-related Web sites. “Why would my competitors link to me?” they often asked in reply.

Here is why you want links from industry-related Web sites:

• They build your credibility by showing you participate in the industry community
• They help get your site crawled
• They may send you visitors
• They help build your brand value by increasing your visibility

I didn’t say they help by passing PageRank and I didn’t say “your competitors’ sites” I said “industry-related links”. What’s an industry related link? It could be a professional organization you belong to, your local Chamber of Commerce, maybe a legitimate business directory that specializes in your industry (not an “SEO-friendly directory”), an industry council or advocacy group’s Web site, an industry publication’s web site, etc.

Maybe there are industries that don’t have these kinds of resources, but I’ve never run into one that didn’t. They should be out there. Find them. Make an effort before you throw in the towel and say they don’t exist. Those types of sites will be more selective than so-called “SEO-friendly directories” about whom they link to. There is value in that selectivity.

And those are “relevant links”, by the way. But they are not relevant because they use your keywords. Judging relevance on the basis of keywords is formulaic and mechanical. You’re trying to do SEO by the numbers and that is just kindergarten-level SEO. The best relevant links you can get are the links that would make sense if you didn’t have to think about search engines. Assume for the sake of compiling relevant links that search engines don’t exist: who is an influencer in your industry who can give you a link?

It’s not your competitor.

People today try to bake their relevance. They cook it up with links and wonder why every time a search engine sneezes they fall out of the search results. It’s because you’re depending on “SEO-friendly” resources that really don’t help you. A good link helps you more through direct branding and visibility than through its search engine mojo. If search engine mojo is all a link offers, it’s not offering much.

Any low PageRank link can pass anchor text. The more anchor text you pass, the more relevant your destination page becomes to the anchor text. That’s the way it works. Repetition of keywords.

A lot of people who still swap links mention that they “only exchange links with relevant sites”. What’s up with that? If you sell toy cars and you swap links only with toy car sites, do you seriously believe you’re gaining an advantage over all those other toy car sites? They’re all getting links from you, dude. Your link anchor text helps them just like their link anchor text helps you.

Think about who buys toy cars: children, parents, aunts, uncles, grand-parents, collectors, etc. Who would be most likely to discuss toy cars with a passion? Who would be most likely to link to truly useful toy car sites that help them satisfy that passion? You’ll probably find a few retailers in that crowd, but most toy car afficionados don’t actually create toy car collecting Web sites. If they create Web sites at all, they may mention their passion for toy cars somewhere on the sites. Maybe.

Maybe someone decides he wants to compile the most extensive list of toy car resources ever. He may not operate a real directory. It could just be one humongous long list of toy car links. Is there value in a link on such a page? Well, I’d rather have the link than not, so there is that much value in the link.

The Toy Car Manufacturing Industry Council may mention members on its Web site. Maybe Grandpa John mentions where he bought a toy car for his grandson Robbie on his blog. Relevant links come from many different sources. They may appear in newspaper articles, magazine articles, articles on fishing boats, blogs about sports, etc. They’ll be relevant if they are embedded in text that, taken on its own, make a coherent point about toy cars.

Here is an SEO Law: The relevance of a link is only determined by the text in which the given link is embedded.

There is no mention of Web site theming. There is no mention of page focus. If you write five paragraphs of text about your toy collection as a kid, and you devote one paragraph of text to toy cars, you can embed a link to your toy car business site in that one paragraph and you have a relevant link.

Relevance is not about links. Relevance is about content. Content is a lot of things. Links may actually be content. Put enough links together and you have a lot of anchor text. So what if the links point to 50 different pages? Are the pages really worth linking to? (You can only determine that if you don’t get any money for the links.)

Here is another SEO law: The SEO value of a link is directly proportional to its inverse monetary value.

That means the less you pay for a link, the more value the link possesses. But wait! you point out. Aren’t many free links worthless? Absolutely. Many free links don’t help with your search engine optimization. But you know what? You took the time to get those worthless free links, so there is value in them that you yourself placed there. It’s just not the kind of value you were hoping for.

SEO value is a fairly worthless commodity. It’s a horrible metric and it leads many a would-be optimizer astray. How many times a day do people visit SEO discussion groups and ask for help in figuring out what has the most SEO value?

A third SEO law can be stated thus: The relevance of a link is inversely proportional to its SEO value.

That means, the more SEO value a link obtains, the less likely the link is to send natural, relevant traffic to its destination. Where links are concerned, relevance is judged by the results. Does the link send relevant traffic? Does the link send traffic at all?

Whether a link helps you with your search engine results is irrelevant. In most cases, you’ll never know. No matter how strongly believe you know if a link helps, you don’t. And even if the link helps today, it may not help tomorrow for any number of reasons. So where should you place most of your value in your links?

And I’ll very briefly touch on authority. A lot of people in the SEO community talk about getting links from “authority sites”. Sorry. That dog won’t hunt.

Authority sites rarely link out to non-authorities and non-hubs. But I’ll come back to that another time.