Lets talk about contextual links and engines

yenerich

Hi,

I read that some people here gives much importance to contextual links/ engines, specially for links to money site.

Which ones gives you better results in your opinion and why?

Personally i dont see THAT difference, but maybe i am wrong. Im interested to talk about it.

young_gooner

the word "contextual" says it all my friend there is a BIG difference between Contextual Links like drupal and Blog comments,HUGE in terms of SEO value

yenerich

Yes, blog comments, personally i don't like it. 

But you cant have 100% contextual links, thats my point, that does not look natural.

I think that a mix of contextual and not contextual is better IMHO, but i read many people that thinks different. Thats why i want to discuss about it.

1linklist

Lets talk about what the world "Contextual" actually means, in "SEO" terms - and not just as a "Contextual" platform.


Contextual Platform: Somewhere you can make contextual links

Contextual Backlink: A backlink, placed in a sentence/paragraph that is contextually relevant. (About the same subject).

Basically, a contextual backlink means a topic-related anchor text/keyword link, IN an relevant articles text.

These kinds of links are obviously preferable, as Google and other large search engines use semantic-engines to determine what a page is about. They dont just look at anchor-text links to decide what a page is about, but process all the text on that page.

Having backlinks from related sites and subpages boosts your relevancy score (And it looks more natural). So aside from the advantages of being the only outbound link on a page, you also add legitimacy and relevancy to that backlink by surrounding it with related content.

Basically, yes, contextual backlinks are the way to go whenever possible.

yenerich

Well, i understand that.

But for me the discussion is, somehow, like the dofollo-nofollow one.

I know is better to have dofollow links and i know what does dofollow (or contextual) means, but i dont think its very naturall to Google if some site show only dofollow or only contextual links. That could make Google to notice that someone is building links.

In the real world, if you have some sites that receive organic links, it will be a mix of dofollow-nofollow, contextual-nocontextual links. If the percent goes in a noticeable way to somewhere its possible that the owner of the site is building links.

Organic links are a mix of everything. Nobody make an organic link to somesite having in mind if the link is dofollow/nofollow or contextual/nocontextual.

In fact, if we take -like a little experiment- this blog as an experiment, the real and organic links are NOT contextual ones.

If some people ask us to reccomend, let say, the best Captcha service. Nobody (and i check it) answer with a contextual link.

An answer linke:

I think that xxxcapctha is one of the best capctcha services.

Is very, but VERY uncommon. Check this forum and you will notice that contextual links are not the organic ones.

Contextual links are in the signature ads!!

Is like having 90% of dofollow links... in my opinion is flagging you site telling Google "Hey, im building links".

That is my opinion. That is the discussion that im proposing. How natural or organic could looks if you choose to build mainly contextual links?

Imagine i run my VPS building links.

I pick contextual links PLUS some othe like microblogs, social bookmarks, etc (that are basically non contextual). a few hours latter i will have a nice mix of dofollow-nofollow-contextual-noncontextual that will looks natural.

I avoid blog commens maybe, exploits, rss, etc. but i do not avoid ALL non contextual.

What do you think?

In my experience is the way to follow.

davbel

@yenerich you've made a very good point that doesn't ever really get talked about and a lot of what you say makes sense.

If you use all the Social Network sites, then quite a few of them don't place contextual links, so that should help balance it out a bit.

I don't think you should totally disregard blog comments as manually ones can also have value and again add to the link profile naturalness.
      

Seljo

I think  the mix is important. I however avoid trackbacks,indexer,exploit,rss. In fact I made me two groups of links, one is only contextual doffollow links and the other is blog comments etc..

yenerich

@davbel right, im agree.

@Seljo totally, avoid the ones that you point, also url shorteners, etc.