You may have heard before that relevance plays a huge part in how your web site is ranked. 

Which web sites link to you (inbound) and which sites you link to (outbound) should be related to your own site in terms of an overall content-based theme.  This allows the search engines to categorize your site by “association”. 

Sites that link to you and are not relevant provide no real benefit in terms of your search engine ranking results.  You wouldn’t be penalised for having unrelated sites linking to you as this would be particularly unfair and could lead to your competitors linking to your site from all and sundry in an effort to negatively impact your search engine position.  But you only get “link juice” from established, related sites where the link to your own site has been in place for some time.While you cannot control who links to you, you can control who you link to. 

The search engines will place a higher weighting on the types of outbound links that your site has.  If you link to sites that are banned or are in “bad neighbourhoods”, your own site can be negatively impacted.  Relevance is a real issue with your outbound links.

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