When you’re devising your internet marketing campaign, it has been the case until relatively recently that people have been seeking out the pages with the highest PageRank to take their links. However, the current school of thought is that PR is less important than the relevance of the website in relation to your own. There are several reasons for this.
Firstly, it’s a far more natural approach to link building. While a search for high PR websites to accept your links can lead to your content being split across a strange variety of sites with content often shoehorned into an inappropriate category for the sake of high PR, this approach appears to be far more reminiscent of how links really work. Website A, B and C are in the same field. Website A is considered an authority on the subject, so B and C link to A. It is now argued that it’s better to have these links from other sites in the same field than any powerful, high PR website.
The main reason this is useful is because when Google is trying to match pages to a search term, if it sees a large number of relevant sites referring to one other site, it suggests that the other sites in the field are ‘vouching’ for that website as an authority, making Google more likely to select it as a top result. It’s the equivalent of all the small bakeries in a town sending their customers to one big bakery, considered the authority on cakes, to help them with any important queries. It’s better to have the smaller bakeries referring you to the big bakery than one big garage and one big garden centre.
Another way to look at this analogy is that it builds trust between your site and Google. If you’re looking for a complex wedding cake, are you likely to listen to all the little bakeries, with at least some expertise in the field, telling you to visit the big bakery? Or would you prefer to take the advice of the best car mechanic in town? It’s the same principle. Even if that garage is world-renowned for fixing cars in no time at all, it’s very unlikely that they’ll have much specialist knowledge about cakes, so you should listen to the people in the know.
While ‘irrelevant’ links aren’t necessarily a bad thing, as they can form part of a natural network of links, it starts to become an issue when you’re clearly targeting lots of irrelevant, but high PR, domains to take your links. Google will spot that this is unnatural, and it will make it harder for Google to notice you as particularly relevant for the search terms you want to target. Too many links from sites outside your field might also look spammy, so think about sticking within your industry.