A crap site with no related links and keyword stuffed text and links ENTIRELY from IRRELEVANT client sites can easily outrank your original content with organic links (you know, the kind Google says is the best links) in SERPS.

In the SEO related rankings anyway.

The site below ranks no3 in Google for a sought after seo related term, and has just about 100% of it’s links from, totally unrelated, client sites….

I guess that search engine optimisation company is giving Google what it wants. Focused keyword rich text links from real sites no matter the relation in terms of industry.

But what can this tell us from a seo point of view?

I surmise and theorise:

1. Links from REAL but unrelated sites are still EXTREMELY valuable, no matter how you look at it, I don’t see google Caffeine sorting that out.
2. Google doesn’t give two £$%^ about the SEO vertical and will let manipulative strategies work, no questions asked
3. On a limb here – The seo community links suffer from some sort of inbred link rot which makes them less valuable (!) links because of all the interlink love going on

Inbreeding is breeding between close relatives, whether plant or animal. If practiced repeatedly, it can lead to exposure of recessive, deleterious traits….

For me when linkbuilding, it’s links from REAL sites that count, regardless whether related or not. The more popular the real site, the better.

I constantly ask myself:

Just how important are UNRELATED links?

In the seo vertical, very.

I also ask myself…

Should I take backlinks from all my SEO client sites?

Defo works, just as well as it did in 2001, it seems lol

You can spy on your own backlinks and some of your competitors links using the Yahoo Site Search while it’s still available

Getting links from related sites is cool, but links from unrelated sites obviously have a part to play too – big time.