The importance of the semantic affinity of links

The semantic affinity of links is a concept that is heard more and more in SEO every day, and this is because it is one of the factors that is gaining the most force in the link building or link building strategy.

 

After reading this article, it is very likely that you will change the way you search for links that point to your website.

 

Although the number of backlinks is still an important factor to climb positions in Google, its algorithms are evolving and every day quality is valued more than quantity.

 

Getting many links to point to your domain without paying attention to the quality of these could be a bad SEO strategy.

 

You may be wondering how Google measures the quality of links. Well, it does so by giving it a value, depending on some factors.

 

One of the main ones is the domain authority, that is, the relevance that a website has compared to the rest. So, getting relevant backlinks is fundamental.

 

In colloquial terms, we could say that the authority is the popularity of the website. The higher it is, the better the positioning of the web, because Google understands that if a domain is very "popular" it is because it is good.

 

Another factor that the search engine takes into account to weigh the quality of the links is the semantic affinity that exists between the two linked websites.

 

The higher the affinity, the greater the value that the algorithm assigns to the link, and this will positively impact the positioning.

 

What is semantic affinity for Google?

We could say that semantic affinity is the degree of relationship between one website and another, understanding by relationship the coincidence of words, concepts, expressions and themes that both share.

 

This is calculated by crawling both sites in full: all pages, titles, meta-titles, images, image titles, positioned keywords ...

 

As you can see, an exhaustive analysis is made of both websites, and not a mere comparison of positioned keywords. This nuance is important, because the positioned keywords are not decisive to assign a theme to a website.

 

Imagine you have a "board games" website. In it you make reviews of a multitude of games, of different categories and for all ages. It could be the case that your page is positioning for the word "poker", because Google considers that some of your articles are relevant for that word.

 

If we look only at the keywords positioned to search for semantic affinity, an online gambling website might be interested in yours because of the positioning of the word "poker". When in reality they are not related themes.

 

Ultimately, semantic affinity goes beyond the words positioned, although it is an indicator to take into account, it is not enough.