When people talk about rankings and building links in general, sooner or later they will mention relevance.
I can imagine different people would have different explanation on what relevance actually is but here’s my definition when it comes to linkbuilding relevance:
Backlink relevance means surrounding hyper-linked anchor text pointing to target site with content matching the theme of a target site.
In non-robotic language.. if you target chiropractor site that link should have chiropractor related content around it.
I won’t argue that to have this type of content around your link is the best possible scenario but the question is…
Is It Really Necessary?
I have been building non-related PBN (private blog networks) links to my money sites with great success for some time now and I’ve put together a little case study to prove that relevance is a bonus, not requirement.
I have conducted a little experiment:
I took a 7 weeks old niche site and built 3 PBN links to it.
Until that point the site had zero (0) link built to it and it just passively got out of sand-box.
This is a perfect testing ground because I’m playing on a blank field.
I always re-create original theme of the site to increase safety. So the content surrounding the links will be completely unrelated.
The Experiment
Target site niche: Software downloads (video games)
Target site age: 7 weeks
SERP position at the start of experiment: 22-28
Prior linkbuilding: None
Number of PBN links used: 3
Power of PBNs: PR3-4 range
PBN and content themes:
- general health
- muscle building
- music art
Anchor text of the links:
- 1x exact match
- 2x partial, closely related match
As you can see from the above data, the only related piece are anchor texts. These anchor texts are inserted in the content in such a manner so readability is not hurt. However, overall it doesn’t fit content at all.
Example: This piece of musical art can be found on iTunes and you can also download GTA 5 for free here along with it.
So…
It’s been around 10 days now since the links were build and the results are as follow:
SERPfox usually can’t gather search data properly. That’s actually 3900 searches a month keyword
As you can see above, power, authority and trust of a domain is far superior to relevance.
As we all know Google is all about trust these days.
Trust > Relevance
What I did was hardcore to prove my point. You can get creative and make the content match the anchor text, theme of the target site and also theme of the PBN.
Let’s say you have a body building blog. Your target site is about GTA 5 downloads and you want to have download GTA 5 for free as anchor text.
You could easily get content on the topic How Addictive Gaming Can Destroy You Muscle Building Routine and nicely blend your link in.
But this is all easy stuff.
Who wants to get REAL hardcore?
Foreign SEO
I have 3 authority sites in foreign niches. By foreign I mean they are not written in English language and their target audience doesn’t speak English.
One is in French (France market) and the other two are in Portuguese (Brazil market). Niches are e-cig, muscle building, male enhancement They all have between 15-25 pages ranking for various keywords.
Their home pages have social profiles pointing at them, social signals etc. but their true rankings come from a PBN.
An English, utterly unrelated PBN that is.
The sites have been on the 1st page for months now ranking for various terms. Here are rank graphs of 2 primary keywords of the male enhancement site:
Again SERPfox got search volumes completely wrong.
90% of the links come from English PBN, hosted on US servers. As a matter of fact, money sites themselves have .com TLD and are hosted on US servers.
As for linking out from PBN… this time it’s completely off-topic, unrelated and honestly looks like PBN got hacked and hacker inserted those links without my consent. 🙂
Example: I woke up this morning and noticed that my suplementos com hormonios masculinos are missing so I had to get out of bed earlier and get some.
So this time it’s not just the relevance of content that’s missing, it’s language as well!
And it works like charm!
Conclusion
Some people may argue that it’s dangerous to link-out like this and there is a high risk of PBN being de-indexed. Those websites have over a year each and PBN for them was built at similar time. So far no de-indexing.
What is your experience with non-relevant linking? I suggest you give it a try and see for yourself. Feel free to share your results below:
Click Here to get links from websites that are safe and trusted by search engines
