flicker - 4:57 pm on Mar 23, 2004 (gmt 0)

I think it would be close to impossible for an algorithm to determine if one page is truly completely irrelevant to another. I have an esoteric educational site that got a link from an online sports column a year or two ago. I was certainly surprised to see those referrals start popping up, but when I went there to check it out, the link actually made sense in context. There was no other content about my topic on this page other than the sentence with the link to me, but it was actually an organic link.

It would be silly of Google to penalize links whose relevance wasn't immediately apparent, and I find it hard to believe they do this. More likely links from clearly on-topic sites are getting some kind of bonus. I'd be very curious to know how that works--for instance, my site gets a lot of links from other educational sites and kids' surfing sites which are not about my topic, and I wonder whether Google notices that they are related or not. But I'm certainly not suffering any sort of penalty from any of them and they all show up in my Google backlinks, including the ones I've linked back to, and even including the sports link.

I also have a hobby page from which I've linked to a few pages by friends of mine on completely different topics, to no apparent ill effect. One of those sites has no other incoming links and now shows PR on the toolbar, so evidently Google counted the 'vote' from my site just fine.

I get the idea that Google is more annoyed with webmasters attempting to 'hoard' and manipulate PR right now than they are with webmasters linking out to other sites that aren't 100% on topic. I don't work for Google though, so who knows if i'm right or not. (-: