Link Building and Industry Relevance
by Bob Stone on Aug.25, 2009, under Link Building
Search engines have very specific criteria that determine how they rank websites when a user performs a search. As many people know, having more sites linking to you means that search engines will generally rank you higher. However, there are special rules that apply to this process. One of the rules, which all web promotion services companies know, has to do with a thing called industry relevance.
Search engines will give more value to links to your site if they come from a site that deals in a similar industry as you. For instance, if you run a site focused on computer hardware, then the best site to get a link from is another site dealing in hardware. Computer software sites or other electronics sites will also be a pretty good match and help boost your page’s rank. However, if you were to get a link from a site about gardening, for whatever reason, it would be of minimal benefit to you.
This process is called applied semantics. It is a technology that browses through each page, searching for keywords that indicate would industry the page is associated with. It’s not an exact science, but it is pretty accurate. It views links that cross from one industry sector an unrelated one as suspect, and thus ranks them lower. This is yet another reason you should take care in choosing how you build your link network. You don’t want to invest time and effort into a link partnership that won’t provide you any meaningful benefits.