After a scary drop out if the top ten, my stock market blog is up to #4 in Google for "stock market idea". No word yet on "stock market investment idea" or "stock market investment" which seem to be far more competitive terms. Nearly all of the links coming into my site are from blogs or message boards. The blogs are typically related somehow, but the message boards are generally webmaster boards (I've got the stock blog in my signature on these boards). I think it's pretty clear that these unrelated links are helping which means two things to me:
1. The people who say that links must come from relevant sites are a bit off. (I just finished deleting a bunch of gambling spam comments from this blog - would they be spamming me if it hurt them in the SERPs? Nah, they want unrelated links.)
2. I proabbly have to stay active on different message boards and find blogs to comment on... Not that I never spam a blog. I always think about the entry and only post if I have some thoughtful comment or question. Also, most of the incoming links are from blogs that put me in their sidebar (thus giving me links from virtually every page). There are many other links to so the PR must be pretty diluted, but PR isn't all that important anyway.
Posted by James Trotta at September 7, 2004 12:38 PMThe fact that people want non-relevant links (your gambling spammers) no more proves that the links-must-come-from-relevant-sites people are wrong than the fact that people are still smoking even though medical people says it is harmful proves that the medical people are wrong.
Not everyone knows that relevant links are more helpful. So people still even think that PR helps search engine results position.
For Google it is all about numerous relevant keyworded anchor text links from pages with high page reputation.
Relevant links are more helpful, but one way links never hurt. A link with good anchor text coming from a quality but unrelated page is still helpful.
Posted by: James Trotta at October 17, 2004 11:23 AMTrade links with seo-search-engine-ranking.com
http://www.seo-search-engine-ranking.com/ad_network_222.php