Confused linking still good?

[Doyle]

I have been doing seo on my site for many years and have good rankings with the search engines. I have been reading as of late that getting links from people is now bad even if they are relevant. Is this true?

[joshz]

It's always been true. Relevant links are key.

[Jeremy-SEO]

To be specific, what do you think of this link for a site a friend of mine is working on:

www designstyleguide net/community/alfresco-garden-lunches-conservatory-chill-areas/

It's a blog post with the anchor text 'rattan furnishings' linking to the homepage of www rattan co uk

Is that a good link?

[pro_seo]

I have been reading as of late that getting links from people is now bad even if they are relevant. Is this true?

Relevant links are always good for your site's rankings. But try to get one way relevant links than links from dirs and reciprocals

[joshz]

The area of the link looks decent to me. Granted, not all links will be exact matches, by being in the same industry is a good start.

The best thing to ask yourself is this: "would a visitor from said linking site click on to my site naturally?"

If so, then perfect. If not, then you might want to reconsider the linking page.

[fathom]

I don't think you can generalize this so easily as relevant or related links purely from external sources. That is a very narrow vision of link development.

Wikipedia does not rank #1 for SEO because it has lots of high quality SEO related web pages from SEO sites linking to that page. In fact, it has very few solid links to that specific page... and yet it is #1.

It ranks well because of the millions of other unrelated links to the domain some to Internet Marketing, some to Marketing, some to Internet, and many to completely unrelated referencing pages (in general) but because to acronym for SEO appears on those pages (as some obscure fact) that converts the unrelated to being related.

The sheer volume of internal SEO anchored links (to that page) makes Wikiopedia rank #1... thus it sort of refutes what conventional thinking suggests.

[Test-ok]

unrelated links to the domain some to Internet Marketing, some to Marketing, some to Internet,

Exactamundo!

[bkseo]

yup still good the key are the following three imo

1. Build them at natural pace (don't make too many in short period of time
2. Watch out for anchor texts. Stick to your brand stay away from keywords in anchor texts. Maybe one and two every now and then but not too many in short time
3. Get links from highly relevant sites that have good authority and ranking. Some sites are set up just to sell links or host content stay away from those sites. Get links from sites that have some sort of following and search traffic. don't just look at their mozrank or PR, but also look at the type of traffic they are getting and their following (like socialmedia following and etc)

[Jeremy-SEO]

2. Watch out for anchor texts. Stick to your brand stay away from keywords in anchor texts. Maybe one and two every now and then but not too many in short time

Is it possible to give an idea as a percentage as how many anchor text links vs branded links a good link profile should have?

[Doyle]

what if my url and my company name is my keyword?

[bkseo]

No and no one knows or can know because it depends on factors beyond your control. What I have done that has been working well that for less quality less authoritative links, I have done them branding (website name with or without www and http://) and then a couple of really high PR high authority links I through in my keywords in the anchor texts but even then I made sure its long pharase. For example if I want to rank for "SEO Firm" I dont put "SEO firm" in anchor text I put something like "SEO firm of the year" or something like that. 100% keyword anchor texts are almost dead (unless you get them from very high authority and trusted site like NYtimes or CNN). If they do work, it will be for a short period of time just not worth it.

[bkseo]

then not as bad but still want to look natural. Make sure you mix it up with www, http://, your domain.com, just your domain name. And as usual aim for high quality sites imho diversification of links don't matter as much any more rather their quality and authority and relevency

[Doyle]

Great advice. I always have them use my company name, which is my KW which is my url. I will start asking for a longer anchor text and will do the same for them. Also I will mix it up with Http://, also.