SEO Superstitions: Links from Irrelevant Pages
Claim: Links only help search engine positioning if they are from pages related to the subject of your page.
Status: Dubious
This is not exactly untrue, but it is not quite true either. The claim is that if you are, for example, a computer
company, getting a link from a shoe company or a history Web site will not help your page or will actually hurt it. Some
of the "help" displayed by Google and other search engines encourages this rumor. It is probably not really true. Think
about it. Wikipedia and Yahoo! are two examples of sites that have very high rankings, and many Wikipedia pages are
listed at the top of Google listings returned for a particular keyword. What is Wikipedia "about"? If your page or site
were linked from the main page of Yahoo! or Wikipedia do you think that would hurt or help your rankings? It might
conceivably be true that if your page is about Widgets, it is more helpful to be listed in the Wikipedia page about
Widgets then to be listed in a Wikipedia page about Woodrow Wilson for example. Even that is dubious. Search engines
can't really know what is relevant and what is not relevant. They may want to encourage "organic" optimization that is
based on real content, but they can't know that Woodrow Wilson is not related to Widgets, any more than they can "know"
that Zen is related or not related to motor cycle maintenance. Remember, all the listings in a search engine are done by
machine, and they must be done fairly quickly. Think of the database and software engine that might be needed to
categorize a page of text like this, that refers to many different subjects. Unless a person looks at the page and makes
a judgement, it is not possible to know definitely that it is not related in any way.
Here is the way a superstition can start. This is an actual quote from an SEO "expert:"
Superstition: The more reciprocal links you have with other sites, the better your own search engine ranking will be.
Fact: Just having your website linked to obvious FFA or link farms, could penalize your ranking. The idea is to get
quality inbound links from related sites. Although no one really knows how Google factors the PR ranking with search
results related inbound links seem to have a greater PR value than a million unrelated links to or from your site.
The author was trying to sell his services and mystify and confuse his readers it seems. The problem is that the
expert "explanation" doesn't relate to the statement that was classed as a superstition. Getting a lot of links from
Wikipedia or Yahoo will help your Web site, no matter what business you are in. As a rule, the claim that this man
branded as a superstition is correct. The more links there are to a page, the better your search engine ranking will be,
whether he means Google Pagerank or position of the page in results returned for a keyword.
