Linking is an important subject for search optimization. Obviously links are important to search engines and to site owners, but there is a great deal of argument about how important and how valuable certain kinds of links are.

Links come in several flavors.

• Navigation
• Contextual
• Sitewide
• Reciprocal
• Image

The biggest debate is whether certain flavors of links hurt your ranking in search engine ranking pages. Many people believe that sitewide and reciprocal links are damaging. Many believe that sitewide links have diminishing returns. You can still find people, especially in certain business verticals, that still employ link exchanges to boost their ranking. And there are examples where it works.

Will, one of the members of SEOmoz, spurred a discussion of their community to describe what they feel the perfect link is. You find a theme in the responses. A page with high PageRank and relevant content. Rand gives some useful information on positive factors in a link about midway through the comments — they are all formating/site structure.

I have seen many people suggest that search engines look for relevant themes from one site to another. But how does that function? According to Google Matt Cutts is the most relevant result for “changing printer settings in linux” check the backlinks — mainly SEO sites. Are they relevant to Linux or Printers? No, but many of them link with the posts title “Changing the default printer on Linux and Firefox,” some of the sites linking are made for Adsense sites that are just publishing the RSS feed. But if you check the links to the following three pages in the SERP you will find no links or links from Linux related sites. And yet Matt is the clear winner — with no visible backlinks from a “related site” — there is plenty of related anchor text from sites unrelated to the content of the post, which is generally not the theme of Matt’s site.

I’ll go out on a sturdy limb and say that Brother and Novell are deemed relevant from on page content and internal links. Matt in terms of links is the clear winner with 80 external links from sites that thematically are irrelevant to the content on the page. Relevant links are largely an unsupportable category, a fake flavor. The entire concept of link baiting is that any link to your site is a good link. That the collective weight of links — on topic, off topic, big site, little site, etc. — will propel you in ranking.

Links help establish the relevance of the anchor text to the content they link to. The anchor text also establishes relevance for the page that it is on by being content for that page. Much of the Internet is editorial in nature, especially since the popularity of blogs, subject is fluid, interests change over time. Natural linking is in general sporadic and varied in topic. It would be detrimental for a search engine to filter out natural link patterns. External links give juice to a site that the site passes on with its links. Once your blog gets thousands of links — I’m looking at you Matt — it really can rank for anything that it creates strong content for. Don’t let yourself be tricked into the mentality that you should be concerned by the links that come in.

If you are creating good content you will get what you need to rank well simply by working to be visible. Every eye that sees you will tell others that you have something valuable. Focus on creating connections and build your links as if the search engines didn’t exist, you will get the best results that way.