You might have heard this advice from several SEO experts as well as from search engines also that the quality of the link is important. The quality of the link will be determined by the page rank as well as its relevance to our website. As a result, when you are developing linking strategies, it is important to include only relevant links.

Relevance means that the website either should be in your niche or should be somehow related to your niche. For example, if you are running a website about traveling through the US then US hotel websites or specific city tour websites can be considered to be relevant. Other US travel websites are your direct competitors, therefore, they should not be considered as relevant links.

This might sound very simple and easy to remember. However, if we do this then you might have only ten or twenty links at the end of the day. This is not enough when you see the hundreds of links that your competitors are having.

So, how will Google determine the relevance? Well, I believe this is completely at random. If you take my example, then you will see that many of my links that Google has registered are relevant according to the above definition, however, many others are not. In fact, not one of our suppliers who have provided us with their back links and have a high page rank is a part of this relevant list. So, are they not highly relevant? Well, that remains a mystery.

If we go and observe the back links on some of my big competitors then I find that the situation is becoming all the more confusing. Only a few appear to have any relevance; however, I am not the one to judge here. After all, I do know how these companies work and what possible connections they might have.

As far as I am concerned, I feel that there is no specific formula or guidelines for deciding the relevance. It is all arbitrary. Therefore, I continue to develop links that according to me are relevant.

If Google had taken its own advice on the subject then it would have links to none other than search engines. Isn’t it?

All the SEO experts can say all they want to about developing links only to relevant websites, but not one of them mentions how to find if the website is really relevant or not.