Internal page linking

[inertia]

Originally Posted by OldWelshGuy

Irrelevant inbounds, especially from an authority could IMO do more harm than good.

How could they possibly do any harm?! There's a huge thread over on WPW about this - Can Inbound Link Hurt You

At the last company i worked for we used to buy link packages from an Indian company. These were completely irrelevant links on PR3-5 pages, sharing the page with at least 30 other random links and using whatever link text we wanted.

These campaigns did well! So do irrelevant links really cause harm?

[OldWelshGuy]

Firstly you have misrepresented what I said, I didn't say 'irrelevant links really cause harm' I said an off topic link form an authority 'could' possibly do more harm than good.

My reasoning is this.:~
Authorities know their stuff. Government departments are tightly focused, an off topic link therefore could confuse the search engines into theming your site wrongly. Nothing more, nothing less. I was talking about theming sites and authority links, not off topic linking in general. Two completely different things, as low authority sites have low trust levels and as such probably can't carry much contextual power.

Hope that has made my position a little clearer

[inertia]

I see your logic.

If we had a site with a very weak link profile (all off topic links) then i can see an irrelevant link from a trusted site might confuse the search engines. But IMO, i think in most cases it would take several irrelevant links from several trusted URLs to upset the search engines theme view of a site.

[aaliyahlim]

It is best to do both internal and external linking, with this two combined it will be easier to get traffic.