This is from the Firepow forum – part of a case study I’m doing for the members there, but I thought I had to share it with you too.
Enjoy!
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So I’m checking the search rankings today for my keyword that’s the name of this clickbank product I’m now ranking for, and I notice a new site has come into the rankings.
I click to see on the site (which is now ranking just ABOVE me) and what do I see…
It’s an NMOC site! (a site built on the methods from my first report, for those who don’t know) Same WP theme I recommended, same structure – it’s NMOC to a T.
Beaten by my own student! Like hell I’m gonna let this happen!
So I start analyzing his incoming links, and notice something fascinating.
He actually has quite a few incoming links – probably more than my site BUT…
They’re from totally irrelevant sites!
For example, his site is on dog training, and he’s got links from sites on construction, dancing, and … basketball – what all seem like other sites of his, PERHAPS even on the same host and IP (i didn’t check that) and that’s getting him above me! And I have a number of links from relevant content on relevant blogs of HIGH PR, on the blog network!
That said something very strange to me… what if the idea that we should only get links from relevant sites is wrong?
I mean I know it’s not wrong, but maybe its just not as RIGHT as we think.
I started thinking: How is google going to judge the quality of a link coming back to me?
The first thing I thought is, ok probably by LSI relevance first – but from this piece of evidence it would seem like AUTHORITY – and not even authority in that niche, could come before LSI relevance.
This guy obviously had some aged domains, on sites that had some decent links pointing to THEM, with a decent spattering of content – ie, seen as nice and Authoritative – and google is giving a link from them some weight even though they aren’t directly relevant to the linked site based on any keyword.
ALSO, they were crappy links on resource pages – not in content, not on a page themed to the link – and on a page with a hundred other outgoing links… things I generally thought would detract from the quality of those links.
Obviously not – maybe the SE algorithms aren’t as smart yet as we give them credit for.
Maybe I’m making a judgement too fast and my site is getting ready to pulverise his with my killer relevant links after the next crawl… we’ll see.
Either way, this is some mighty interesting information in my mind – something I’ll definitely be doing more testing on.
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Andrew,
It sounds to me like they are a member of Jonathan Leger’s 3 way links .net. I was a member for the past few months. However, it seems that for some people the jig is up. Google is de-indexing sites related to this linking scheme.
My sites listed with this service did have good rankings for the keywords I chose. However, as of this morning, I’ve lost all of my rankings.
I just canceled my subscription to this service today. Some people are still doing okay. Right now, I have a feeling it’s a house of cards.
While the service, 3 way links, may not be the most ideal way to go, it did prove the point that you mentioned. Google doesn’t care that the links aren’t “relevant.” In fact, Jonathan Leger made a post about this; it’s titled Why Off Theme LInks Have to be Counted by Google:
http://www.jonathanleger.com/why-off-theme-links-have-to-be-counted-by-google/
Like I said, there was a time when I would have strongly recommended this service, but I can’t in good faith do so anymore. I’m not the only one that this happened to recently.
The point that backlinks, from any site (as long as it’s not a “bad neighborhood” site, are still good links has been proven.
Jason,
It’s interesting you say that because the site I mentioned in this post has also disappeared from the rankings as of two days ago…
Could be a reshuffle so we’ll have to wait to see but what a shame for the 3 way link users if that’s the case.
Cheers,
Andrew
Although conceptually great, a link threesome is against Google’s TOS.
I’ve also never seen evidence of link exchanges being penalized.
I come from a computer gaming background where we webmasters were exchanging links under ‘affiliates’ section (which simply ment another related site we like and that links back to us) long long long before Google came out with PageRank.
With that said, I’ve always believed the actual link exchange penalty is very minor (if at all) and differs per niche.
Last but not least regarding related links.
I’ve test-linked some of my websites from my network of gaming-related websites. All websites are on 1 domain name and broken down into over 50 highly popular subdomains. 7 of these subdomains have a PR6 the rest has PR5.
ALL sites I’ve linked to from my own network have instantly gone from ‘PR unavailable’ to PR 4 or PR 5 upon the first crawl all the while they are 100% UNrelated.
The total backlinks in yahoo from this are between 100,000 and 200,000 at any given time.
There are 0 other sites linking to some of these domains and yet I am able to bring em from PR nothing to PR 5 instantly.
I’ve just added 2 sites yesterday as I’m expecting a new PR update within a few weeks and we’ll see if these 2 sites will still be instantly upped to PR 4 or 5
Andrew, feel free to contact me if you’re interested in further study / discussion in private.
Hi Andrew,
I’ve never been one to hunt out relevant links too strictly. Ill take any one ways I can get my hands on.
However, if I ever have the choice Ill of course choose the relevant site over the non relevant one. My thinking is that even if relevancy isn’t that important now, in the future it will be. The algorithms will get more advanced and be able to better detect this sort of thing.
My advice is to take any link you can, but keep in the back of your mind that a relevant link will be more beneficial, if not now down the track. If youre in it for the long haul Id say thats the best approach.
Mike
Mr LSI, I just wish I had a PR5 site to do that with!!!
But I have some that are PR2, I suppose that might be worth trying. I’ve never linked my sites, nearly all of which are at hostgator and all at the same IP.
What do you think?
Your seeing two sides to the same coin. Yes, “relevant” links are critical to GOOGLE’s system of valuing links. But that takes time. About 3 months. Does “3 months” ring a bell? So sure, anybody who relies exclusively on unrelated links will eventually get creamed during an update. Some of my 20 sites will too. It all depends on if the irrelevant links of mine are better than my competition. The only problem I’ve had is with JL’s Sharapost system. It will build 100’s of valid Google crawled links in an instant. I’m glad I wasn’t making money with that site at the time. The big Google Ray gun vaporized it.
Lyn, you can crosslink 10- 20 sites. That’s because most business do that.
The danger comes from making somebody mad
at you and they find all your sites. It happens. I kicked out a hacker who broke in and he got mad and pounded my site with hits so it couldn’t run for a couple weeks.
I was thinking about joining that service. It did seem to easy. I am glad I found http://www.bigbloggingbusiness.com
Hey there Andrew.
It’s easier to get 20-30 pr2 links than it is to get 2-3 pr6-7 links – I think it’s a matter of weight.
I think 20 pr2 = 1 pr6 – Something to that effect.
I know a lot of successful marketers who live by the saying ” A rising tide sinks all ships”.
I have a couple of methods that work fine for me that I’d never share for health nor wealth, but I’m confident in saying lots of average links is as good as a measly few decent ones.
Food for thought.
Cheers A.J
3Way Links both did and still does work right now but – and here’s where I disagree with Jonathan Leger’s assertions – it most definitely DOES leave a footprint and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Google was starting to downgrade sites in the network.
As far as off-theme site links still being good for ranking are concerned – absolutely, no question about it, as I’ve proved many times over. In fact, back last year when I was testing trackbacks, I was amazed how many trackbacks from porn infested sites helped rankings.
LSI? – forget it for links.
With some of my sites I’ve had a very loose backlinking “plan” – getting links from a huge variety of non keyword-related sites. The sites have done very well and some of them outperform competing sites with a similar number of backlinks, but who are getting links from keyword related sites only.
Some of my favorite places to grab high page rank links from include gossip blogs, humor blogs, pet sites, news sites, and others which have a do follow policy (not all do, but many of them do….I even got a do follow link from About.com a while back, which I’d been told was impossible.) Another good place is hobby sites – sites where visitors have a passionate interest in an author, hobby, genre, etc. Most of them are generous with do follow and some have very high page rank.
Based on my own experiences, I do think that these backlinks are fine and they don’t “bleed” relevancy for your site at all.
Think of it this way…..we know that Google is always saying that they are looking for things to be as organic seeming as possible. Isn’t it far more organic that people across a wide range of sites on different topics might link back to you? Instead of it ONLY being from keyword related sites? People often casually share links to sites they like, and humans don’t naturally cluster all the time at sites that are oriented around one group of keywords. We hang out all over the place!
I know my daily routine (she says with a red face) involves checking out my favorite cat humor sites, and there are plenty of people out there like me!
So I think the whole SEO tradition of only seeking backlinks from highly relevant sites might be getting outdated – if it was ever true at all. I certainly haven’t seen sites lose traction in Google when I’ve gathered non-relevant backlinks; if anything, these sites are actually pretty bullet proof.
With this latest page rank update especially I’ve noticed that sites with more “organic” seeming backlinks (from all kinds of sites) are faring much better than sites where I’ve only built highly relevant backlinks. Page rank remained the same or better on the sites with more non-relevant links, while page rank dropped on sites with narrowly focused backlinks.
So that’s interesting! I suppose time will tell.
Jennifer