Content and Backlink Visualization, in what neighborhood does your website reside?

Jim Rohn famously said, “You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.” This concept perfectly applies to my example today when it comes to your neighborhood of content and backlinks!

The image below is an impression of how Google views your interlinking, which in this case—and for the sake of this metaphor—is our neighborhood of content. In a similar fashion, your backlinks are organized similarly by Google.

Earlier I mentioned content and backlinks; yes, that’s right… The right backlinks are great, but if the content in which the backlink is presented does not complement its destination, then more damage can be done than you think.

With that in mind, you may wonder, is negative SEO a real thing? You will have to keep an eye out for my blogs as I cover this topic in the future.

Everyone seems to be focused on “damaging backlinks.” While in principle this may be true, the fact remains that it’s the content and not the backlink itself that is causing the damage.

One might argue the incoming link is coming from a page containing content that is 100% relevant to the destination URL. While this may be true, how does Google view that outgoing link? While the content (the page domain.com/your-content-page) may contain 100% relevancy and even the right KW density, etc., which relates to your destination URL, you need to appreciate that the page itself has an allocated relevance to the root URL of the site as a whole.

For instance:

Let’s say you have a plumbing business, and you post your content with an outgoing link within that content which is “Auckland Plumbing” going to your Auckland Plumbing website.

The keyword relevance we are looking for in this instance is “Auckland Plumbing.”

Relevance would be split in the following manner (relevance is an estimate based on calculations of existing clients):

52.33 – 33.38 = 18.95

18.95 Potential Relevance

The outgoing link is on a page of the popular directory. Directories have thousands of outgoing links to various niches and sites. This means that the domain itself plays a role in the total number of relevance linked to your outgoing link. The more content is added to that site, the smaller your relevance becomes.

In the example above, the relevance score you want for your KW should be over 50%. The 18.95% is directly linked to that relevance. Now here is a mind-blowing fact most SEOs don’t recognize: while you are allocating 18.95% of relevance to the term “Auckland Plumbing,” what happens with the remaining 81.05%?

Of course, an additional variety of relevance will also be allocated to the destination URL, reducing your global domain relevance and trust. We all know what happens when this reaches the extreme end of the scale—we start using the Google disavow tool!

It’s very important you don’t outsource your SEO to just any SEO company, but to someone who understands the design and algorithms of popular search engines.

SEO is very sensitive, and often it can take months or even years to undo the reputation you have created for your site based on your neighborhood of backlinks and content.