Link Building – Relevance Or Authority?

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

You would think when reading some articles that there was some confusion over relevance and authority when it comes to link building. For most website owners, obtaining a link from a relevant page on an authority site is heaven. I was not aware they were mutually exclusive.

A post on SEORoundTable on determining authority for link building could give rise to some confusion. More confusion could be generated given that PageRank was used as one method of determining authority. PageRank of course is a Google score that is terribly unreliable – it also ignores the other search engines.

While authority and relevance are not mutually exclusive, it is worth thinking about. Many would claim that a link from a site with authority is far better than a link from a relevant page. I would argue this point on two levels.

1: Who is determining authority? There is no reliable ‘score’ that suggests one site has more authority than another. PageRank is not reliable and only indicates a Google assessment. Perhaps keyword SERP placement across a variety of search engines could be used as an indication.

2: Even if you could determine authority, if the link is not from a page that is relevant to your page, the link will most likely be devalued anyway.

Receiving links from pages with relevant content, particularly if the link uses keywords in the anchor will over time prove to be more valuable than an unrelated link from an ‘authority’ site.

Ironically, links that meet the ‘relevance’ test will help to build authority over a period of time and over time the page containing the link may well grow in authority.

Authority and relevance are not mutually exclusive and in any link building campaign I would prefer to see links that incorporate both. However, given the choice, I would prefer to see links from pages with relevance. Having said that, links are links and in a link building campaign it would be a rare situation where I would ask a site to remove a link.