Linking question

Should I seek a high volume of links or relevant links?

[justdave]

When requesting links, would it be a better strategy to request links from a variety of sites of varying topics, or should I try to stay with sites relevant to the particular site.

I guess what I'm asking is which is better? Obviously i would ideally want a lot of relevant links, but are sites that are off topic going to be good/bad links?

[stevenmusumeche]

Get as many links as you can, focusing on relevant links. Don't turn down off-topic links. YMMV.

[justdave]

okay, kinda on the same subject. If i offer a link exchange, should i only offer this if the sites are relevant, or to any site? If I offer it for anyone, do I need to categorize it, or does it really make a difference?

[neuron]

The difference is in the other's site. If they engage in reciprocal linking with other sites on a non-themed basis (that is, outside the general topic of site relevance) then ask them to exchange links. If they engage in themed linking only, and you are not in their theme, then don't waste your time or theirs.

All incoming links help you, even if it is just a non-sensical URl like www.domain.com/page27.html, but links with targeted anchor text basically count twice as much as a raw URL link, and in the future, there are expectations that H1 headings and page titles will contribute to link value as well. If that ever does happen, then links from themed, on-topic sites will not be discounted when the algorithm changes.

[mfishy]

there are expectations that H1 headings and page titles will contribute to link value as well.

What Google, Yahoo, or MSN employee said this? If none, than where do these expectations come from? It is much more likely that reciprocal links get disregarded altogether then the major SE's stop counting "off topic" links.

To date, the only comment I have heard from an SE rep regarding theming has been from GoogleGuy. Can't find the link to the post but he said that he was not "entirely convinced" about the argument for theming.

I would go for as many links as humanly possible if you are attempting to rank high on anyhting competetive. If the pages that are linking to you are scoring well on the keyword you are after than that is a slight bonus.

[mcneely]

Ours has been roughly a 50-50 ratio of off topic to topic and it seems that we are picked up more frequently now as a result.

Before, all of last year and the year before we remained on topic and it didn't really do much for any sort of ranking, although our base link popularity numbers were great.

It appears that with being somewhat more broad based in our linking approach, by listing other non-topic sites that our clients might be interested in has given us a bit of a kick, in that traffic has increased for us because of the range of search terms being used with regard to these new off topic links.
An added plus has also been the exposure that we are given each time a new page hits the index.

We have found that although we don't sell clothes, for instance, having a links/resources page totally dedicated to clothing links has proven beneficial as just one more good resource the index bots can publish to their databases

Just my two cents worth