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So I think the whole SEO tradition of only seeking backlinks from highly relevant sites might be getting outdated – if it was ever true at all.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

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.

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

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