A Link Doesn’t Mean Squat if it is Not Relevant

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

Does the idea or even the phrase “link building” still make your head spin? What does it all mean? The bottom line and most important key point to understand about link building is this: Link Building = Marketing!

Everywhere you turn online you see blogs and experts saying that link building is so important when you are building a business online, but if you speak with ten different internet marketing specialists you might get ten different answers on how to go about link building.

Years ago link building was a different beast. It was all about getting as many links as you can. Things have changed and evolved now and those links are probably useless unless they are sitting on relevant industry websites. If you are still confused on where I am going with this let me show you an example.

Website A sells fishing gear and is trying to get a link from website B. Website B is a directory for automotive supplies. The two industries are completely unrelated and a link in this directory will add no value in the eyes of the search engine. It actually might hurt website A. If website A found a hunting & fishing type directory that is a highly relevant industry directory a link there would be beneficial in that it will pass along a great deal of link juice over to website A. Relevancy is an area that is getting much stronger in the eyes of the search engine. The search engines don’t want websites to just blanket links across vast amounts of websites any longer. This type of approach does not help anybody and really just clutters up search engines. On top of it all it just doesn’t make any business sense to link to a website that has nothing in common with your business or your industry. Why would you as a business want to shove a link on a completely irrelevant website? If you think about it logically the type of visitor that might make it over to your website is not the right type of visitor for you. Google has made large strides to strengthen this factor in their algorithms and it is something that is only going to get stronger with time.

Make sure to keep in mind that when building your links they should always be relevant to your industry. The best types of links are the ones that happen naturally. When they occur naturally they are usually highly relevant because it is someone in your industry taking the time to write about you or your business.