You may have heard before that relevance plays a huge part in how your web site is ranked. 

Which web sites link to you (inbound) and which sites you link to (outbound) should be related to your own site in terms of an overall content-based theme.  This allows the search engines to categorize your site by “association”. 

Sites that link to you and are not relevant provide no real benefit in terms of your search engine ranking results.  You wouldn’t be penalised for having unrelated sites linking to you as this would be particularly unfair and could lead to your competitors linking to your site from all and sundry in an effort to negatively impact your search engine position.  But you only get “link juice” from established, related sites where the link to your own site has been in place for some time.While you cannot control who links to you, you can control who you link to. 

The search engines will place a higher weighting on the types of outbound links that your site has.  If you link to sites that are banned or are in “bad neighbourhoods”, your own site can be negatively impacted.  Relevance is a real issue with your outbound links.  You want to make sure that you are linking to related “authority sites” when you can but also to other sites that are considered “relevant” – to make sure that you are controlling the overall “community” in which your site exists.  This concept of community is going to become increasingly important as personalisation starts to become more prevalent in search.

So how do you determine relevance? 

Common sense should be the overriding factor when you are evaluating potential links (outbound, inbound, or reciprocal).   If the site in question is clearly not relevant in your eyes – then don’t establish a link.  Another approach is to use Google to determine if the site is relevant. 

Google has a sophisticated set of algorithms that determine relevance and so rather than trying to re-invent the wheel, why not perform a quick litmus test using Google as the base line.

For example – say you have a Graphic Design company and you are considering a link to another site – for the sake of this example, let’s say “Virgin.com”.  You could try the following query in Google:

site:www.virgin.com "graphic design"

You will see that there are no results – and so in this case, Google does not considerer www.virgin.com to be relevant to your keywords. 

But let’s say you are considering a different site – someone like LogoWorks (www.logoworks.com) – if you try the same query:

site:www.logoworks.com "graphic design"

You can see that Google returns 54 or so pages that it considers related to this key phrase and so you can assume that LogoWorks has some relevance to Graphic Design.

This is an easy and effective way to at least eliminate sites that are clearly not related. 

In the end, you have to rely on common sense to determine how and if another site is related to yours.

If you want an even easier method to test relevance – why not try our Site Relevance Test in our SEO Tools section of the Vertical Leap UK web site.  You simply add a web site and a set of keywords and we will analyze these for relevance and instantly let you know if you should consider the site for any sort of linking relationship.