Does Google Really Care
About Relevancy of Your Backlinks?
In general, Google is doing a lot to set up many great trends in the Internet. But when it comes down to certain nuances, even Big G has weak spots. One of them is understanding the relevancy of your backlinks.
I have seen tons of examples of Google screwing up about relevancy, but below is one of the best examples. So, let’s do a simple test. Go to Google.com (international version, not a local one) and do the search for ‘tea’ and the site that I see on position #1 is… well, have a look on the screenshot below.
(based upon IPs the results can be little different,
but I checked it with many users – they see this site on page 1)
How Did It Get There?
It has Nothing to Do with Tea!
Well, the answer is on the surface – abbreviation for Texas Education Agency is TEA. And most likely people, when linking back to the site, preferred to put ‘TEA’ in the anchor text instead of ‘Texas Education Agency’.
Do you believe this site is getting backlinks from tea-related sites? Surely no. I assume most of the backlinks are coming from the sites in the same industry (education), local online media, blogs, forums, chats, etc.
So, conclusion #1 – Google does not care about the relevancy of the sites from which you are getting backlinks.
Do you believe that the web pages, from which the backlinks were coming, had anything to do with tea? I hardly doubt it.
So, conclusion #2 – Google does not care about the relevancy of the text, into which your backlinks are inserted.
And what Google seems to care about is:
- anchor text of backlinks
- number of backlinks
- quality of backlinks (for example, reputation of the web sites from which you are getting the backlinks)
- mentioning of the keyword on the page of your site (though, you see, Google does not even understand that the site context is not about tea, but about Texas Education Agency – mentioning a keyword seems to be more than enough, which makes it pretty simple for OnPage optimization)
Ok, Is it the End of Thinking about
Relevancy in Link Building?
Obviously at the moment relevancy is not an issue which is “rewarded” by Google. But let’s not hurry up with the decisions.
We don’t know where Google will be in a year or two years. Maybe they will start addressing this issue more seriously. And though they will never punish for incoming backlinks (for the reasons of it – read & watch this video post), still – why messing up with that things?!
Moreover, when your backlinks are published on the sites relevant to your topic – this increases the chances of visitors from these sites clicking your link and coming to your site directly.
So, it is still wiser to build backlinks from the relevant pages. Not because Google is smart about the relevancy right now (you saw the example of this “smartness” above), but because who knows what happens in future. That is why in Free Traffic System we have you total control over the relevancy of the blogs that you choose for your backlinks.
