What Neighborhood Do You Live In?

Link building these days is all about topical relevance. In other words, pages that link to each other should cover similar subjects. The closer the two pages are in topic, the better the link is likely to be perceived by the search engines. This rule applies both to the sites that are linking to you and to the sites you're linking to.

Don't Sweat the Small Stuff Of course, you can't always control who links to you, so there will be exceptions to the neighborhood rule. This is actually not a big deal. Every site has a few off-topic links pointing to them. In fact, a small amount of off-topic links makes your linking structure appear even more natural. But you should strive to make the bulk of your incoming links come from topically relevant sources.

As ranking algorithms become increasingly advanced, search engines are evaluating web sites in terms of neighborhoods of related sites. By linking to, or being linked from, an unrelated site, you're venturing out of your neighborhood. Sometimes this is viewed suspiciously by the engines.

The most valuable links are from web pages that feature content related to your site. Links to or from off-topic pages are less useful, and, in some cases, too many of these off-topic links can even be harmful to your site's search engine rank.

 Find your neighborhood and live there. 

As search engines evolve and become harder to manipulate, links from important sites within your niche will continue to grow in value. This is key to establishing your site as ...