The Case Of Topically Irrelevant High Pagerank Links

When working on link building for your site, you will find some sites with a high pagerank, but with nothing that relates to your site. They might not even be in your field of operation. This might prompt you to think that there is no need to pursue a link because you feel they have nothing to offer to your site. Most people only pursue links on sites they have something in common even though not in the same line. They feel that the search engines will rank their site better because of that and this will increase the traffic flowing from the site to theirs. However, there is every reason why you should not ignore the sites.

For instance, Yahoo picks of the week at http://picks.yahoo.com/picks/ is PR8. Some of the sites that appear can include a page about poodles or surviving in the mountains. However, the Yahoos picks page has no relation with the sites that appear on this selection and it changes daily. Therefore, if Google or another SE wants to pass credit to the sites in the selection, an exception is needed on the relevancy part of the algorithm because of the ZERO relevancies that comes up, in terms of the subject between the Yahoo Picks Page and the sites in the selection. Most of the site owners get to this part and shy away wondering what good will come out of it.

These links hold a lot of value, which is beyond what the search engine can understand. There are so many people who read the Yahoo picks page everyday in all parts of the world through their emails, while others use the web- based archives, which is countable. It is impossible to pass the credit through email-based links. Therefore, even if the search engine thinks that the link is irrelevant most people (like me) do not mind because the main interest is the millions of people reached because of the site reviews and the links that that these reviews possess. That is the expectation of any link builder or the link seeker and it is only a click away. Such opportunities for editorial link are similar such as USA Today Hot Sites, Family First Picks and many more.

As a result of their mass availability, the thin line between link building and publicity blurs, if at all it was there initially. The editorial links are one way, they cannot be purchased or hand picked by human editors. Principally, they are read though emails but can also be found in web archives. Most of the sites have learnt to take advantage of these features and they have improved their ranking tremendously through the link to the popular sites and directories. I hope that with time, Google and other Search Engines will drop the subject relevancy factor and focus on the editorial credibility of the sites. The sites are looking for a link that will help them improve their pagerank. This is because the editorial links are not paid for and they are also not negotiable because they are based on content quality.