daveshap - 9:18 pm on Mar 2, 2008 (gmt 0)

I think relevancy in acquired links is still a factor that carries significant weight, however is less important for older sites than it is for newer sites. I don't think renting higher PR links is a good long term strategy. Take that money and invest it into content creation or site upgrades, both things could generate permanent links that you don't have to pay for each month.

Other ways to find links in your category include:

Look at your category in Yahoo Directory and/or DMOZ and if you can't find more sites that would be logical link partners, you should look at sites in your parent category. These are also good sites to get links from.

For example, if you work with a site that sells hot tubs, there is a category in the Yahoo directory called "Pools, Spas, and Hot Tubs." After going through all of those sites, you can then look at the parent category (Home and Garden) and those would also be relevant sites to get links from. The fact that in both Yahoo Directory and DMOZ the parent child/relationship exists, it's likely the search engines would consider links from those sites topically relevant.

You could also use the 'related:www.site.com' command in Google to find sites that share similar link profiles to the site you enter into the query. This could help find similar sites to those that are authoritative in your niche.

- Dave