Are On-Topic Links Important? - Whiteboard Friday

How much does the context of a link really matter? In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand looks at on-and off-topic links to uncover what packs the greatest SEO punch and shares what you should belooking for when building a high-quality link.

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're going tochat a little bit about on-topic and off-topic links. One of the questions and one of the topics that yousee discussed all the time in the SEO world is: Do on-topic links matter more than off-topic links? Byon topic, people generally mean they come from sites and pages that are on the same or very similarsubject matter to the site or page that I'm trying to get the link to.

It sort of makes intuitive sense to us that Google would care somewhat about this, that they wouldsay, "Oh, well, here's our friend over here," we'll call him Steve. No we're going to call him Carl,because Carl is a great name.

Carl, of course, has CarlsCloset.net, CarlsCloset.net being a home organization site. Carl is goingout, and he's doing some link building, which he should, and so he's got some link targets in mind.He looks at places like RealSimple.com, the magazine site, Sunset Magazine,UnderwaterHoagies.com, Carl being a great fan of all things underwater and sandwich related. Soas he's looking at these sites, he's thinking to himself, well, from an SEO perspective, is it necessarythe case that Real Simple, which has a lot of content on home organization and on cleaning upclutter and those kinds of things, is that going to help Carl's Closet site rank better than, say, a linkfrom UnderwaterHoagies.com?

The answer is a little tough here. It could be the case that UnderwaterHoagies.com has a featurearticle all about how submariners can keep their home in order, even as they brunch under the sea.But maybe the link from RealSimple.com is coming from a less on-topic article and page. So thisstarts to get really messy. Is it the site that matters, or is it the page that matters? Is it the contextthat matters? Is it the link itself and where that's embedded in the site? What is the realunderstanding that Google has between relationships of on-topic and off-topic? That's where you geta lot of convoluted information.

I have seen and we have probably all heard a ton of anecdotal evidence on both sides. There areSEOs who will argue passionately from their experience that what they've seen is that on-topic linksare hugely more beneficial than off-topic ones. You'll see the complete opposite from some otherfolks. In fact, most of my personal experiences, when I was doing more directed link building forclients way back in my SEO consulting days and even more recently as I've helped startups andadvised folks, has been that off-topic links, UnderwaterHoagies.com linking to Carl's Closet, that stillseems to provide quite a bit of benefit, and it's very had to gauge whether it's as much, less than,more than any of these other ones. So I think, on the anecdotal side, we're in a tough spot.

What we can say is that probably there's some additional value from on-topic sites, on-topic pages,or on-topic link connections, that Google has some idea of context. We've seen them make hugestrides with algorithms like Hummingbird, certainly with their keyword matching and topic modelingalgorithms. It seems very unlikely that there would be nothing in Google's algorithm that looks at thecontext or relationship of content between linking pages and linking websites.

However, in the real world, things are almost never equal. It's not like they're going to get exactlythe same anchor text from the same importance of a page that has the same number of externallinks, that the content is exactly the same on all three of these websites pointing over to Carl'sCloset. In the real world, Carl is going to struggle much harder to get some of these links thanothers. So I think that the questions we need to ask ourselves, as folks who are doing directedmarketing and trying to earn links, is: Will the link actually help people? Is that link going to beclicked?

If you're on a page on Real Simple that you think very few people ever reach, you think very fewpeople will ever click that link because it just doesn't appear to provide much value, versus you're inan article all about home organization on Underwater Hoagies, and it was featured on their homepage, and you're pretty sure that a lot of the submariners who are eating their subs under the seaare very interested in this topic and they're going to click on that link, well you know what? That's alink that helps people. That probably means search engines are going to treat it with some reverenceas well.

Does the link make sense in context? This is a good one to ask yourself when you are doing any kindof link building that's directed that could potentially be manipulative. If the link makes sense incontext, it tends to be the case that it's going to be more useful. So if Carl contributes the article toUnderwaterHoagies.com, and the link makes sense in context, and it will help people, I think it'sappropriate to put it there. If that's not the case, it could look a little manipulative. It could certainlybe perceived as self-serving.

Then, can you actually acquire the link? It's wonderful when you go out and you make a list of, hey,here's the most important and relevant sites in our sector and niche, and this is how we're going tobuild topical authority. But if you can't get those links, hey that's tough potatoes, man. It's no betterthan putting a list of links and just sorting them by, God knows, a horrible metric like PageRank orAlexa rank or something like that.

I would instead ask yourself if it's realistic for you to be able to get those links and pursue those aswell as pursuing or looking at the metrics, and the importance, and the topical relevance.

Let's think about this from a broad perspective. Search engines are caring about what? They'recaring about matching the content relevance to the searcher's query. They care about raw linkpopularity. That's sort of like the old-school algorithms of PageRank and number of links and thatkind of thing. They do care about topical authority and brand authority. We talked about onWhiteboard Friday previously around some topical authorities and how Google determines theauthority and the subject matter of a site's authority. They care about domain authority, the rawimportance of a domain on the web, and they care about things like engagement, user and usagedata, and given how much they can follow all of us around the web these days, they probably knowpretty well whether people are clicking on these articles using these pages or not.

Then anchor text. Not every link that you might build or acquire or earn is going to provide all ofthese in one single package. Each of them are going to be contributing pieces of those puzzles.When it comes to the on-topic/off-topic link debate, I'm much more about caring about the answersto these kinds of questions -- Can I acquire the link? Is it useful to people? Will they actually use it?Does the link make sense in context? -- than I am about is it on-topic or off-topic? I'm not sure that Iwould ever urge you to prioritize based on that.

That said, I'm certainly looking forward to your feedback this week and hearing about yourexperiences with on-topic and off-topic links, and hopefully we'll see you again next week for anotheredition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.