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often, though, these people say that
irrelevant links will not help your
rankings in the SERPs and they have
various opinions about the effect on your
PR. My first question is
whether Google actually knows whether a
site is relevant or not.
Say your
website’s topic is holiday
destinations and you have a resources
directory. One page in the directory is
only for links to software related sites.
Therefore, all the descriptions of those
sites make the topic of this page
software related. If you put a Google
Adsense block on this page, you will
quickly see that Google considers the
topic to be software related. So, the
question is then whether Google considers
the relevance of the whole site or just
that page. I don’t know.
More
important though, is the perceived
importance of that little green bar at
the top of your browser. Have you ever
tried exchanging links with a PR7 site
when your own site is only a PR1 or
anything less than a 5? Most webmasters
will laugh at the suggestion. So how do
you get a link from a PR7 site? Get the
green bar to grow!! I think most people
do the same as I do when they receive a
link request. I open the requesting site
and have a look at the PR. I personally
link to PR 1 and PR2 sites if they are
fairly new (check their whois
information), but I don’t think most
people even bother with that.
As I
mentioned before, I agree with the theory
of linking to relevant sites. However,
until you have a respectable PR, it will
often be easier to get links from
unrelated sites than just finding willing
links in your specific market.
Does a
link from an unrelated site help your PR?
Most definitely!! Even if it doesn’t
help your SERP ranking, it does help your
PR. FryYourBeef.com is a bit of an
off-beat site where people can complain
about whatever is on their mind. A bit
hard to find related sites, so I have
exchanged links with sites from any
industry. Though not much, it does have a
PR4 without me having to spend too much
time on it and I don’t know whether
it has any related links.
So here’s
my opinion. When you’re starting
out, get as many links as you can with
relatively good PR, even if they’re
not related to your site. A link from a
PR2 site when your own site is PR1, is a
good link. Chances are, that other site’s
PR will increase with yours and
eventually that’ll be a PR5 or
higher link.
Having
said all that, I do believe that a
relevant link adds a lot more value to
your site, both in terms of SERP ranking
and directed traffic. Therefore, once you
have some PR (say PR4 or 5), it’s
time to start focusing on your own
market. By this time people within your
industry will be more willing to consider
your site for linking and as we all know,
link exchanges are hard work. So spend
your time effectively by gaining links
that will benefit your site.
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