Remember the film Clue? Based on the game Cluedo if you live in the UK, it was a classic whodunnit in a country mansion. There were several endings, and in each one Tim Curry said “Communism was just a ‘red’ herring….”.
In terms of linkbuilding, you can now use this phrase when talking about the near-dogma of building only relevant links:
“Link relevancy was just a red herring….”
Google, especially Mr Cutts are happy to bang the drum about relevancy, as are many in the SEO community. But ask the simple question “how is link relevancy evaluated”, and everyone looks at their cyber-feet and shuffles off to write another blog post.
For my sins I am a miniature wargamer. I am into “historicals”, ie, real wars and history such as the WW2. I view Warhammer and Dungeons & Dragons as almost a different hobby, and for most historical wargamers it has no relevance whatsoever.
So does Google understand that vital distinction within what an outsider views as a single hobby? How can they understand that although a gaming site might link out to sites in all those genres, to each of those groups the other links are completely irrelevant? Of course Google can’t, and that is why relevancy is nonsense. How can Google make arbitrary decisions about the weight of links when relevancy is a very individual thing.
Of course there are obvious ones like a David Beckham blog linking to a football boot manufacturer, but how can it give more weight for some links as relevant but ignore others that are just as relevant or not because it simply cannot determine that relevancy.
We are lead to believe that Google determines relevancy through associations as well as through keywords and text relevancy. This conjures up an image of the Googlebot poring over the newspapers everyday and understanding that names within the same text are actually associated and relevant to each other. It is of course all possible in this day and age, but is that how it really is? Or is it a red herring to make us comply?
Fear is Google’s friend, and the SEO industry by and large stokes the same fire, making joe public scared that their website will plunge into an abyss should they dare to have one more instance of their keyword on-page, or from getting a link from someone they are not sure about. It is of course mostly nonsense, but it feeds the fear that keeps people in line.
If you parallel it with how religion was used to control the masses throught history, with the threat of eternal damnation for not following a set of rules that nobody understood and that changed all the time, then you will understand more about the tactics Google is employing.
What clinched it for me in the relevancy debate, apart from the evidence of our own test sites, was this comment from Rand Fiskin of SEOMOZ.org on 2nd October, in their company blog:
“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 the message it appears is clear, and even the experts are saying it now.
Relevancy is a red herring.
Build good quality links, and lots of them. If they happen to be relevant as well then whoopee-do, but never, ever pass up a good inbound link because it’s not relevant.
