Internal Linking Strategery!

[Jay]

What is your definition of a themed link?

[webmaster]

For the purposes of simplicity in real estate, I would say go for two kinds of links those relevant to your geographical area, and those relevant to your topic or theme "real estate"

This way you can link to service providers in your area that dont directly compete with you, but would be a benefit to your visitors such as city guides, local mortgage brokers area information sites etc.

With real estate, thats a no brainer (Although it can be a very loose definition) I suggest just targeting other real estate agents websites for partnership as the themes will be plentiful, mutual mention of MLS and home listings etc, Gbot will parse both pages and see that although unique content and mutually exclusive (Not on the same IP etc) they have very many things in common, thus they are on the same theme.

This is a very loose definition that I am just spitting out while I type, but I think the message is conveyed, although perhaps a little clumsily and it is by far not exhaustive, there are many other points that could make something "themed" but I guess my basic final definition is a theme link partnership is 2 sites linking together that are unique in themselves yet have something significant in common

[Jay]

I would agree with your definition. Given the fact that real estate related sites with a PR6 and higher are by far the exception, what PR would you say a site needs to attract these all important themed links?

And what would be your guess how much more important a themed link pointing to your site would be than say one that comes from a site that has absolutely nothing to do with real estate? For example, how many links would it take coming from PR4 pages from non-real estate sites to equal one link coming from a real estate related page that also has PR4?

[webmaster]

Well I honestly wouldnt want unthemed links if I was reciprocating, you see as it is now there is perhaps a 2-1 strenth ratio (If I had to guess) between themed vs unthemed however in the future if its going to be a link exchange then I think they will crack down more and more on relevance so why take the chance of swapping links with non themed sites in the first place?

This excludes simple inbound links however, as you cannot control who links to you, and a lot of people lately have been asking me if you can get penalized for irrelevant links pointing to your site, the answer is an absolute NO.

If that were the case we would all go blog spam our competitors and then report them to get them a penalty, so that is why irrelevant 1 way links are still around such as buying them, or doing so called 3 way trades that can't be traced.

To keep it simple and safe, just swap links with themed sites, for our purposes in this market there are so many damn sites that dont compete there is never a reason to put a viagra site on your site
Just my 2 cents

[Jay]

I am not sure why you would say 3-way trades can't be traced. There is almost always a common denominator that becomes apparent with minimal research.

As for playing it safe, let's look at it from the opposite direction. Why would a high profile site want to take risks linking to a non-related site? For example, a newspaper linking to a real estate agent that is hundreds or thousands of miles away from on many of their pages. What's in it for them?

Another question... let's say I am real estate agent in a competitive market and I want to be ranked in the top 5 for my most important search term. For this example let's use "atlanta real estate" for that search term which has 3 million or so results returned. If the top 5 ranked sites currently have less than a PR5 average and a 100 or so themed backward links then how many themed backward links would you say I'd need to get one of those top 5 rankings?

[webmaster]

I said "so called" and you'll note I wasnt advocating 3 way irrelevant trades at all. its not the right thing to do, but its the general search engines failing to pick up on these, that make them still be in use. Of course anyone with common sense can see a 3 way link, but for algorithms its much tougher but the day will come when it isnt so tough for an algorithm to catch you, so why cheat when you dont need to right?

As for your Atlanta example that's not an answerable question, noone can tell you how many links you need to rank, you will find similar examples with percieved similar competition and one site that is #1 may have 20 backlinks another may have 10,000

ALthough very important themed backlinks do not constitute anywhere near 100% of the ranking algorithm so it really depends on the "mix" how well you have done your onpage, clean code etc.

[Jay]

I am just keying in on one market... Atlanta. It seems to me that if a site in that market had only 200 themed backward links and maybe a PR6 with decent page optimization it should dominate. Wouldn't you agree?

[webmaster]

As I said, its an impossible question to answer, there are sites that target competitive markets with only 30 backlinks and are #1 and there are others in equally competitive markets with 10,000 backlinks and arent in the top 100. Its not "just" about backlinks, its about an overall strategy. Noone can make an assumption of #1 just because of 1 element. Refer to earlier post, its about the "mix"

[Jay]

I would agree that there is a mix... but from my experience it varies much moreso from industry to industry not market area to market area within an industry.

That's one of the reasons I no longer do SEO for real estate agents and their websites. Code I wrote years ago for a specific market can be found in numerous markets throughout the country today in top positions. Too easy to be copied by newcomers to the SEO industry.

And I guess that is what it does come down to... the page coding. What are your thoughts?

[webmaster]

The question is a little vague, sorry My answer is there is no "one" thing that it comes down to.

Moving forward: This thread is about linking strategy, not Q & A with the webmaster we are getting off topic. If you want to have a personal chat with me feel free to add me to your aim or MSN if you want to further discuss in depth stategy, the spirit of this forum is group participation not one on one discussion thats what PM or IM is for.
Thanks