A contextual piece is a clickable text, which is usually a keyword present in a paragraph written in a similar context or idea. The contextual links are basically of two categories.
- Natural: This means that they voluntarily link to another website.
- Artificial: This means that they have been posted, manually.
Contextual backlinks bring value, they help your website gain authority and build trust. This kind of backlinking must be carried out by SEO India experts who know about the several aspects of backlink building.
However, all agencies cannot carry out contextual backlink building. You require a company that uses the practice of building contextual links as its forte.
We are sharing our well-kept secrets of contextual backlink building in this article. You must have heard that contextual backlink building time and again that contextual link building is a necessary aspect for SEO success.
Now, get prepared to understand the underlying principles of contextual backlink building.
There are few of us who might have heard the term “contextual backlink building” for the first time.
Few of us have also been leveraging the benefits of link building.
Now, comes the roller. Your outreach partner can explain to you how contextual backlink building is different from other link-building services.
Google executives often use the term contextual backlink as a term during their discussions.
Have a look at what Mueller from Google had to say.
This means it is one of the few terms with a sure value among Google’s ranking factors.
Contextual backlinks and quality are synonyms for Google. The most popular search engine has kept its ranking signals highly guarded and they can be tough to crack.
Google uses 200+ ranking signals. Surely, it seems that the knowledge of even the best SEOS may amount to just the tip of the iceberg.
But, surely Google wants SEOs and everyone who uses them to understand how important contextual backlinks are.
The Google search process is based on principles of relevance and quality. To maintain the quality, Google carries out a lot of updates of its algorithm each year.
The SERP results appear due to the contextual relevance of the search query the user enters.
Paid ads also work on the same criterion.
Therefore, you will find that contextual relevance is found everywhere across SEO. But, it is a greatly different subject matter when it comes to link building.
What is a Contextual Backlink?
A contextual link is a quality signal for the backlink earned from other sites. Now, let us understand contextual backlinks from Google’s perspective.
Penguin’s Algorithm is putting everyone through this.
According to the experts at SEO Company India, the similarity between the two sites determines the contextual relevance of the links. Google checks this similarity-based on several parameters including business, niche, and the topics covered.
During the early days, webmasters didn’t hesitate to use black hat techniques for tricking the PageRank algorithm.
Taking shortcuts to rank higher by creating backlinks earned from irrelevant websites generally known as link farms.
But, Google decided to end the blackhat SEO practices with the introduction of the Penguin Algorithm in 2012.
Link relevancy is an important metric to build backlinks. Penguin is now part of Google’s core algorithm.
Penguin has enormously changed since its introduction in the core algorithm.
Google can comprehend the credibility and relevance of a website by looking at the links it earns.
The links offer Google all the signals about your niche and its relevance. Google gets to know about the topical relevance of web pages to the search queries that the target audience enters.
The links will help your website to rank higher. But, it can be detrimental if you have too many irrelevant backlinks. Things can be nightmarish if the links are spammy.
Example time
Suppose you are running a financial website offering instant loans.
(This niche particularly is known to give a lot of spammy backlinks).
But, in such a site, if you get a link from an SEO blog.
The above picture gives a classic example of irrelevant backlinks.
If you find any business or topic relevance in the links, so does Google.
What is more important – Domain Authority, Traffic, or Relevancy?
There may be several links built to your site. These Links are usually chosen based on the domain’s authority and the traffic it receives.
Just a few link-building partners like (SECi or Outreach Monks can provide you 100% relevant backlinks. However, you might wonder, what brings the most value? It is considering the:
- Domain Authority
- Organic Traffic
- Link Relevancy
First of all, you need to get backlinks from a relevant site.
Then, your domain authority and the amount of traffic on the site will count to determine the overall quality of the site.
Keep in mind getting a link from a quality site, but with the least relevancy won’t provide you with SEO juice.
You may invest in link building to ensure that you are selecting authority links qualifying the different metrics.
Tools like Ahrefs and Moz can help you find quality links.
Criteria to determine the relevance and context of backlinks
Now, things will be really simple.
It’s only the relevant sites linking back to you, which have a great potential to offer you referral traffic
It is quite simple to identify the relevant links.
How?
Because it’s only the naturally relevant site that earns the target audience’s attention to give you referral traffic.
However, getting links from sites with a highly heterogeneous audience base can go beyond the concept of relevance. For example, getting a backlink from sites like CNN Politics is will override the concept of link relevance.
This is because these sites have great authority alongside a heterogeneous audience base.
It means irrespective of the niche which you target, there’s a high chance of people being interested in the links published on these sites.
They are known as highly contextual links due to the high authority they build. And they are therefore addressed editorial backlinks.
How does Google determine the Context and Relevance of the link?
It’s seen that Google’s algorithms are designed to bait out relevance from the links. But it’s not understood by the SEOs how exactly it’s done.
Earlier, Google just used the anchor text for relevancy. But, many black hats exploited the search engines for this. For example, placing too many links is one such practice.
Sites ranked higher just by building irrelevant links from exact match anchors.
But, Google is much smarter now and it doesn’t work anymore. Though few of us may not like this, they try to make aggressive manipulations.
There are several theories that are running around for link relevance and contextuality. It’s necessary to check the way Google has transformed its Algorithm. Few theories also seem valid. One of the most widely believed theories around link relevancy is Topical Relevance.
Understanding Topical Link Relevance
Link relevance and contextual content are close partners.
Google introduced the Hummingbird Algorithm to shift the focus to contextually relevant articles from keyword-rich articles. Consequently, now Google comprehends semantically related terms.
Not only this, the BERT Algorithm, allows Google search to understand the meaning of sentences.
Google claimed a patent named Reasonable Surfer. This tool ranks web pages/documents based on various features of a link- from a linking document/page to the linked document/page.
The patent also claims that it can track the user behavior data for the navigational actions associated with the link for assigning a rank.
It means that Google understands the very website’s topical strength. So the link juice passed to a site from links from contextually irrelevant pages is severely affected.
So, website owners must consider the implications required for this. SEO agencies building backlinks to sites using random article submissions or Private Blogging Networks (PBNs), won’t see much improvement in their page rankings.
Rather, there are chances that Google demotes such pages.
How Does Contextual Backlink Building Work?
You may still have the question as to what topical link is relevancy all about?
Experienced SEOs explain that it is about the various parameters including:
Same Niche: It is the most evident relevancy that we all seek while building links. For example, a fashion website linking to the latest fashion news. Such a link achieves the highest domain to domain link relevancy for search engines, such as Google. Also, this passes the maximum SEO score.
Different But Related niches: When a fashion website links back to luxury women’s apparel articles, it counts as different but related niches. They are slightly different niches but related to each other. In fact, women’s luxury wear is a small part of the fashion world. This relationship leads to topical link relevancy which can pass a lot of SEO scores.
Contextual Link, But Unrelated Niche: There are times that you get links from totally unrelated websites. But when you check the content, the link placement may be around a context that is relevant to your niche. These links are valid ones and will pass like juice.
No-context and no niche relevancy Links: These are the links that you need to avoid by any means. The reasons are plenty.
- You lose the money building such worthy links.
- Most of the time, these links are spammy.
- Such links signal to Google that you are engaged in black hat practices.
- The worst part is that you can’t display such links to your audience as they give a cheap impression.
Conclusion
It is important to get contextual links that have the most relevance for your niche to get a better site authority and reputation. If you want to understand more and learn about a strategy to earn contextual links, reach out to the SEO India experts at SEO Experts Company India.
