Another Kick in the proverbials for the relevancy preachers?

[thefandango]

Quote from Rand over at seomoz.org

"To be totally honest, I don't think the content relationship (relevancy) or matching subject matter has much of an impact in the algo right now. Off-topic links, so long as they're from powerful, trustworthy sources, seem to help just as much as those with topical matches.
It may seem weird, but I know I'm far from the only SEO to have observed this phenomenon."


So its build links and let relevancy be a bonus if its achieved then?

[claybutler]

I would agree. Go for quality links from anyone. I view relevency in two ways.

1. It's hedging your bets for the future for when (or if) Google get's sophisticated enough to know the difference.

2. Increases your chance of actual click throughs (as opposed to just doing it for link juice)

For the moment though, I've noticed than any quality link helps.

[Tubby]

The words
"so long as they're from powerful, trustworthy sources,"

could mean 90% of their links are relevant - this is part of the reason the site is trustworthy.
If 90% of the links were not relevant - it might be deemed a Week untrustworthy site.

I do not think it is time to start altering the advise we offer - I do not see any changes pointed to in the quote. You could always throw a link in to your mother in laws site and expect it to perform.

[morestar]

I have to agree with Tubby on this. If one links to your site you would think there is some relevancy no?

[loosapphire]

If there is two optional backlinks of the same weight on SERPs, one is relevancy, another is off-topic, which one would you choose? The relevancy one always prevails.

[weegillis]

Ranking and indexing are really two completely independent operations. Without going into factors, it follows that ranking is largely based on links, whereas indexing (and relating to other pages) is significantly based on content in anchor and hook documents. I think we need to see this from both perspectives.