You have two new backlinks to an SEO website. One comes from a digital marketing publication, while the other comes from a large business website that covers everything from finance to hiring.
Which one has the more relevant connection to your website?
At first, the digital marketing link may seem like the obvious answer because SEO and digital marketing belong to closely related fields. This is what industry relevance is describing: how closely the general field of the linking website relates to the field of the website receiving the backlink.
But that raises a more interesting question. What if the large business website links from an article specifically about SEO, while the digital marketing website links from a page that has almost nothing to do with backlinks?
Now the comparison is no longer so simple.
Industry relevance can help us understand the broader environment a backlink comes from, but it does not tell us everything about the value of that particular link.
What Does “Same Industry” Actually Mean?
Two websites do not need to cover exactly the same subjects to operate in related industries.
An SEO website and a broader digital marketing publication are an easy example. One may concentrate specifically on search optimization while the other also discusses paid advertising, email marketing, social media, and analytics. Their coverage is different, but there is still a natural overlap between the fields.
A backlink between them can therefore have relevance at the broader industry level before we even examine the particular pages involved.
This is one reason a backlink from the same or a closely related niche can create an easy-to-understand connection between two websites.
What If the Website Is Not in Your Industry?
Go back to the large business publication from the opening.
Its overall subject is much broader than SEO, but one of its articles might explain how a small company can improve its visibility in Google Search. Within a section about backlinks, the writer could reference your guide about evaluating backlink quality.
The website is not primarily part of the SEO industry, yet the particular page and section have a clear relationship with the destination.
This is why industry relevance should not be used as a gatekeeper. A backlink does not suddenly become irrelevant because the entire website covers a broader or different field. The particular content containing the link can create relevance of its own.
Can Different Industries Still Overlap?
Yes, and real websites make these boundaries messy.
Consider a cybersecurity company publishing a detailed article about protecting WordPress websites. A WordPress publication could naturally reference that article while discussing website security. The two businesses operate in different industries, but the subjects overlap at that particular point.
The same thing can happen between finance and ecommerce, healthcare and technology, travel and photography, or many other fields.
Rather than asking only whether two websites carry the same industry label, it is therefore useful to examine topical relevance within the actual content. Sometimes the connection becomes clearer at the page level than it is at the industry level.
So What Does Industry Relevance Actually Add?
Industry relevance gives you broader context.
If an SEO website receives a backlink from a digital marketing publication, the relationship between the two sites is easy to recognize before you even look closely at the individual article. If the same backlink comes from a general news publication, you need to look further into the particular page and discussion to understand where the relevance comes from.
That does not make the first backlink automatically more valuable. It simply means that the relationship exists at an additional level.
This distinction matters because Google does not publish a rule saying that backlinks from the same industry receive a particular amount of additional ranking value. Google does explicitly prohibit links created primarily to manipulate rankings, but that is different from providing a formula for how industry relevance affects an individual backlink.
You can also explore how Google has reduced the effectiveness of manipulative linking practices.
