I had been watching a particular site with growing curiosity over the last couple years – they got a ton of (great) links to really unrelated content to the topics they were aiming to rank for.
— Jon Cooper | coop.eth (@joncooperatx) June 15, 2020
The results are in: it failed. Badly. pic.twitter.com/nKGmg1FNSL
Their money pages/sections ranked decent after the first few hundred links, but over time, the links to irrelevant content greatly diluted their relevance/authority for those keywords. Today, with way more links, they rank way worse than a year ago.
— Jon Cooper | coop.eth (@joncooperatx) June 15, 2020
Moral of the story: links from non-related sites to non-related content, even if those links are from legit sites and are "earned", can be harmful. Relevance dilution is a real thing, and it's something I've been waking up to more & more through some experiments gone right/bad.
— Jon Cooper | coop.eth (@joncooperatx) June 15, 2020
Links not only pass their equity but they confer a position in the link graph for the intent of the phrase searched for by the user… consequently reduced relevancy will reduce their standing in the link graph for those relevant journeys and the ranking performance therein imo..
— Paul Madden (@PaulDavidMadden) June 16, 2020
To support that theory we did some experiments with disavowing for relevancy and not risk – in a limited test the performance of the site was improved overall as a result of removing (disavowing) those links that didn't contribute to the relevancy journey of the user….
— Paul Madden (@PaulDavidMadden) June 16, 2020
I'd want to do more testing before suggesting anyone did that though….
— Paul Madden (@PaulDavidMadden) June 16, 2020
