March 2, 2008
Y ou M ust Get Links From Related Subject Sites to Rank
I m more inclined to be understanding of people who believe that this myth is true than most of the other myths, simply because it does seem like it would be true. It seems like Google s algorithm would be advanced enough to give more value to links from pages that are related to the subject matter of your own page.
Does Google do this? Does its algorithm give these related-subject links (known in the SEO world as themed links ) more value?
I ll be honest: I don t know if themed links are more valuable to Google.
The reason I don t know is because it is so difficult to get themed links for niche sites, and I deal almost exclusively with niche sites. Finding hundreds of places where you can get a one-way link for a bonsai tree or deep sea fishing site is no easy task!
Even if you can find enough potential places to get a link in niche subject areas, there s no guarantee that the webmasters are willing to sell (or trade) links with you. Besides, I don t trade links, because my research shows that reciprocal linking just doesn t have a lot of link power with Google anymore. One-way links help you out in Google much more (as do links that appear to be one-way more on that later).
Because of this problem, I am forced to get links from sites that have little or nothing to do with the subject matter of my own niche sites. But you know what? Despite the fact that links to my sites are completely off-theme, my sites still rank wonderfully well in Google!
I ll be giving you an example of one of my own sites shortly, but first I m going to show you a site that ranks really well for very competitive keywords that does not rely on themed links for its ranking in Google.
The site is submitexpress.com. As of today, January 9, 2008, SubmitExpress ranks #4 in Google for the phrase search engine optimization. Talk about a competitive set of keywords! All of the top SEO gurus are working hard to rank well for that phrase. That s a real feather in the cap for the guys who do SEO for a living.
SubmitExpress has maintained a great ranking for those keywords for at least the past 6 months, because I wrote a blog post related to this subject on June 27, and submitexpress.com was #3 back then.
(Boy, did the nay-sayers have a field day with that post! Of course, not a single one of them proved me wrong. My favorite one is from a well-known SEO group that started off their rebuttal with the fact that there are exceptions to every rule. My whole point is that if the rule has such huge, glaring, undeniable exceptions , it s no rule at all! Okay, moving on )
So what kind of pages are linking to submitexpress.com? Are they related to SEO, or even general webmaster topics? Very few of them are!
To demonstrate this to you, I wrote a script that extracts the primary keywords in the page titles of the 1,000 backlinks reported by Yahoo. I wanted to see just how many of the first 1,000 links reported actually had anything to do with search engine optimization. Here s a list of the top keywords appearing in the page titles, along with the number of times the keywords appeared in the linking page titles.
- real estate => 81
- county real => 25
- search engine => 11
- oregon real estate => 8
- beach real estate => 8
- web hosting => 6
- web site => 6
- soy candles => 5
- digital camera => 5
- civil war => 4
- goat milk => 4
- palm beach => 3
- fairy wings => 3
- promotional products => 3
- labrador retriever => 3
- acupuncture needles => 3
- myrtle beach => 3
- karo hali => 3
- comforter sets => 3
- business opportunity => 3
- fund raising => 3
Yes, 23 of the 190 occurances shown here do have something to do with search engines or web sites.
That s 12%, you say? Not quite. This list is not exhaustive. The entire list consists of 750 keyword occurrences (most of which are completely unrelated). That means that only 3% of the links to submitexpress.com (at least in the 1,000 samples provided by Yahoo) actually come from pages that have anything to do with search engines or web sites.
That leaves 97% that come from completely off-theme pages (as you can see from the list above). There s no reason to believe that the rest of this site s links don t fall into a similar pattern.
That means that submitexpress.com has achieved the vast majority of its link power, the link power that has it ranked #4 for an incredibly competitive set of keywords, from off-theme links.
Shocking? Not to me! My sites have been ranking from off-theme links for a long time. Now that you can see that sites can rank really well for really competitive keywords with off-theme links, let me show you an example that s a bit more down to earth. This is an example of one of my own sites, ArticleBuilder.net. Here s a snapshot of its current Google ranking for the phrase free web content .
It s currently #5, but it s ranking ranges from #3 to #7 (Google shifts things up a bit from time to time). It s always well positioned on page one, though. Pay a visit to Yahoo s site explorer to see how completely off-theme the links are to this site:
The pages linking to it range in subject matter from building custom furniture to lasik eye surgery to alcoholism treatment and so forth. Virtually none of the pages have anything to do with free web content.
And yet my site has been enjoying page one ranking (and traffic) for close to a year now.
A kind of funny proof that links don t have to be on-theme can be seen in Google s results for the phrase click here .
Seriously, do you think that the links aimed at these sites are from pages or sites related to click here ? Or is it just that the links contain the phrase click here. The answer is obvious. Need I say more?
Myth #3, that you must get themed links to rank well, is undeniably false.
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