Link building is one of the most important aspects of search engine optimization because most search engines are very particular with the link popularity of a web page to determine its relevance. But you don’t want to exchange links with just any website on the internet. There are several factors that will still affect your website’s rankings relative to its link popularity.

Domain authority

There are a lot of factors that determine domain authority: quality and quantity of links, domain rankings on search engines, and the domain’s keyword relevance to the topic. For starters, it’s important to link only to trusted websites. Having your website associated with a page with a low trust profile (as in the case of trashy links) will only hurt the credibility of your own page. Quantity of links is still relative to quality. A thousand links to your site is useless if more than half of these are irrelevant or trashy. A lesser number is better so long as all of them are of better quality.

At the end of the day, it’s all about quality, not quantity of links that you have to your website, that matters in search engine rankings.

Domain rankings

The domain’s rank in the search results will also influence the value of the link coming from that particular domain. To rank for certain targeted keywords, you want to obtain relevant links from a domain that also ranks for the given keywords. This is considered a vote of relevance in favor of your website as far as the key phrases are concerned. In essence, the credibility of the domain you link from spills over to your own website.

This is essentially why it’s important for you to link only to domains that are of high quality and relevance to your site. You want to be associated with all the right sites – preferably the best ones in cyberspace.

Keyword relevance

Some experts believe that domain names containing keywords relevant to a website are considered valuable links. But there are also those who think that a domain still has the potential to rank for keywords that are not in any way related to their name. Take Wikipedia, for instance. Many are more inclined to believe that it’s website authority that is more influential in driving search rankings over keyword relevance. But still, it wouldn’t hurt to give this some thought when link building.