Larry Page and Sergey Brin while studying at Stanford  developed Google,  which would provide better and quicker search results. After months of hard work and analyzing the content  present on the web they developed the Pagerank system wherein it was decided that they would rank a page depending on the content of the website, no. of incoming links and hyper text matching. The most important factor was the no. of links pointing to one’s website. In a real world scenario links represent votes and the more no. of votes a candidate has he wins. It was as simple as that however somewhere down the line the concept of “relevant links ” was introduced. According to this concept, if your website talks about watches and if you receive a link from  a website that talk about animals, this link adds no value to your website. It was argued that only relevant links mattered. It was argued that relevant links meant that someone who has a website providing the same services/information  as you is willing to link to you, thus meaning that he holds your website in high esteem and therefore more the no. of relevant links that you get the more important your website is and it should be placed higher on the Search engine results page(SERPs ). However, I don’t agree with this concept in totality and have listed a few of my reservations.

Relevant links means linking to your direct/indirect competitors and why would you want to do that. One might argue that one gets a reciprocal link in return but it does not make too much sense. Why should I push my competitors ranking up in a bid to push mine? In the real world would the Chairman of company A which manufactures mobile phones  use company B’s  mobile phones and ask “B’s” chairman to reciprocate? It just does not make sense.

Most of the search engines consider data within the anchor- text as content present on your page. This leads to a situation where in the k/w density of your links page increases and the search engines start ranking your links pages. Yes, I know you are beginning to argue that if this is the case then you resources page might be banned because of heavy k/w stuffing. However, this is not the case if you look at the links not all of them target the same k/ws. Coming back to my point high k/w density results in the links page getting ranked and getting a link page to rank higher than all the other webpages is the perfect way to lose traffic !!

Within the domain of relevant links also, Webmasters have different sets of rules. Will a webmaster of  a footwear website refuse a link from BBC.com  just because the two are not related. Take it one step ahead, would that webmaster contact BBC.com and ask them to remove his link. Another point is that if your website has been tagged(Digg, Delicious etc..) by 100 irrelevant websites/  bloggers are you going to contact Google and tell them not to consider these tags. There can’t be different sets of rules for different websites.

I am doing reputation management for one of my clients. We used a lot of socio – media forums and focused on building a certain brand image for the client.  We observed that all though these forums  did rank on all the search engines they did not make it to the first page. We decided to build links to these forums. One way to do this was to create more forums and link them to the ones already ranking. This idea was discarded because generating original content was too time consuming and we really needed to show quick reesults. We decided to use our existing sites and create links from there to our forums and to the main client site. Two months later, we have the results that we wanted. We were very happy that our project was successful however I had some doubts.

The sites that linked back to these forums and the main client site were in no way related. I would classify them as “irrelevant links”, however they worked. These irrelevant links helped push up my web pages and I achieved what I set out to. What I infer from this is that if the websites linking to you are content rich  are useful and generate lot of traffic and leads then the search engines give a lot of importance and these links count very  heavily.

What anyone who is working in the SEO field needs to realize is that search engine algorithms are constantly evolving and one needs to keep abreast with the developments,  else he  runs the risk of losing the race completely.