What’s more important for long term link building strategies… title relevancy or domains? That question was posed to the panelists on our recent SEO Roundtable titled, How iGaming Affiliates Can Recover from Google Penguin.
More specifically, a CAP reader asked if there would be any value to a great blog post with the term casino on a tennis domain? And can you get good traffic commenting on on relevant titles, rather than domains?
It’s a complicated question that Panelists Dave Snyder and Bastian Grimm answered simply. The bottom line is that links need to blend and stay close to your niche. In fact, neither panelist saw much value in a casino keyword-loaded blog post on a tennis site.
Grimm said:
I’m not so sure about a tennis story linking to a casino site. Sports betting, on the other hand, would fit. I wouldn’t worry about, ‘Does it match or not?’ As long as it blends in.’
Snyder agrees that blending in and staying on topic is extremely important. He adds:
Putting a piece of content on a tennis blog that links back to sports betting is a great idea. But the transition between tennis and casinos makes no sense.
Looking at the Big Picture
Link building is an SEO practice that, thanks to Penguin, is really in transition. Many webmasters, like the one who posed this question, are grasping for foothold in this rapidly changing environment. That’s led to experimentation with methods that aren’t all that effective, like building links through blog comments.
Snyder says these efforts just don’t pay off over the long haul:
I think if you’re trying to build links through blog comments you’re probably doing it wrong. I would get back to domain relevance over individual page relevance…Your energy would be a lot better spent creating relationships with other bloggers.
That is the core of post-Penguin link building. Quality over quantity; slow and steady progress that builds the kind of organic link networks Google is after.
Sites that keep their link building focused on relevant, high quality targets are going to have an edge in a market where volume doesn’t mean what it once did.
Have you had success, or failures, with any of these strategies? Share your experiences in the comments section below?