Image via Wikipedia
I was talking with a friend about how a higher amount of contextual links, from pages with lower PageRank, are better than fewer links from pages with higher PageRank but not much context. He was having a hard time grasping that idea. The perfect scenario would be to have both, but if you need to choose where to put focus, I would go with context and relevance first. Don’t make the mistake to get caught up in the PageRank maze. A lot of people still do. PageRank has its importance, but it isn’t the ultimate measuring stick.
Contextual links are a better choice because they are providing links from pages with material that is very relevant to the destination pages within the destination site. It’s also good to have many different sources so that the Googlebot will see those links coming in from different IP addresses, and will see that many different websites, located in several different parts of the country and world, are linking to the same relevant destination and around the same topic of the keywords and content used in the final destination. That’s contextual linking.
Ordinary links acquired from higher PageRank sites can do their job, but they will always lack some relevance, and the focus is usually very narrow. Take this for example:
The screenshot shows the footer of a PageRank 4 website. The links are loosely placed here. You can see that while you have a few links that are in the same topic as the home page (it’s a site about fish), you have others that have nothing to do with it like “English and French Bulldogs” and “Party Poker…”
A link such as this can be hard to get, maybe because it’s expensive or maybe because you can’t find the webmaster. If you’re only going for a few of these you wouldn’t get as much return as you could get with a higher amount of links that are contextual links, like the ones displayed in the screenshots below:
…and from different places, geographically identifiable by IP, and in the case below, also by language…
This is my two cents on why going after relevant, contextual links goes a long way versus trying to score fewer in between links and only worrying about PageRank.
By the way, this is the first post I’m writing using Zemanta.. I’ll write more about it on the next post, it’s a cool tool 
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
Makes sense to me that contextual links would go further to help train the search engines about that particular page. Good stuff!
I agree, the problem is finding relevant pages to post your links on. Where do I locate these links?
I agree with Josh. It’s hard to find relevant pages to put links on.
I have the same problem of finding relevant pages. I think there would be some software to do this.
Great post! Thanks! I totally agree with you. Contextual links are the BEST! Look forward to see more of your articles!
A few good placed contextual links even on a low PR page can be worth tens of footer, side bar links from other PR or other pages.