There's a common perception among a minority of people that inbound links from an off-topic website will devalue the authority of your website.

That is, if your website is about Real Estate in Medford, Oregon, and another website about baseball cards is linking to yours, will that help or hurt the authority of your website?

The answer is that it won't hurt.

The better question is, how much can it really help?

Preface this by accepting the fact that you cannot control which websites link to yours. If someone with a website about baseball cards, decides to put a link to your real estate agent site (maybe because he thinks you're a great Realtor), it's nothing you can help.

Therefore, it's nothing that Google can penalize you for.

That link can only provide with some Google PageRank value, IF, Google decides to credit that link to your website. Remember that Google doesn't credit all inbound links to you; it only does so for those links that it feels meets its criteria, and falls into its authority algorithm.

So, if Google DOES credit you with that inbound link then it does provide you with some PageRank value. How much, will only be known to Google.

You can do a inbound links search for this blog, "link:http://www.realestatehow.com/", and you'll see that Google is crediting me for inbound links from dog blogs, motorcycle blogs, food blogs, business card blogs, and more. As long as you can see those links in that search results, Google has credited me with PageRank value from those sites, and of this writing, my homepage is a PR5 on the toolbar.

But does that help my authority?

Authority is the combination of the prominent keywords of a website, and the website's popularity. Thus, any inbound link that Google credits you with, adds to the popularity of your website, and thereby addresses at least half the equation for authority.

You can also raise your authority by publishing a continuous flow of content. Your blog is an excellent avenue for this. You can also strengthen your authority by one-to-one link exchanges between two blogs. This form of reciprocal linking still works very well when done between blogs, as far as SEO is concerned.

Summary

Authority is something that is well within your control. You can still enhance that authority even with inbound links from totally off-topic websites.

While inbound links from off-topic websites cannot hurt you, it's really more of a question of how much can it help you. It may not help you that much, but then again, that depends on other factors.

Labels: Linking Strategies