In-bound links: Content relevance vs. non relevant

[AndrewC]

How important is the content relevance of in-bound links? Hoe do search engines specially Google treat links on pages that have no relevance to a site? I understand that the amount of clicks on that link will be lower, but what other advantages or disadvantages are there?

[Administrator]

Thats the most important part of google's algorithm and if you crack that part of the algorithm then it would be very easy for anyone to get on top of google's rankings.

Google has some ways of determining traffic as I've seen websites getting top listed just coz of the traffic they get and you dont see any kind of optimization on those websites nor do you see many backlinks pointing to them. one of our associated company started a contest and the contest page got ranking better than any other section of their website. I am still trying to figure out how google could make out that the contest had great importance.

[paul]

Probably on your associated company site google is picking the best url through Canonicalization- it is the process of picking the best url when there are several choices, and interestingly it usually refers to home pages. Possibly you might have placed your contest site url on your home page that is the reason google most likely pick it as a preferred choice. For example, most people would consider these the same urls, when Google “canonicalizes” a url, we try to pick the url that seems like the best representative from that set. Hence it is good to pick the url you prefer most and always use that format for your internal links.

[Peter]

Also a relevant link would more strongly influence ranking potential of your site as compared to a non-relevant link.