Marcia - 4:20 am on Oct 5, 2002 (gmt 0)

>Google is not a theme search engine

Maybe not in the strict sense of the word, but it's not conclusive that some of the factors that contribute to the concept of theming don't come into play.

I believe it goes further than link text, and I've seen a little evidence this update that supports that. There's no other explanation other than that a couple of the factors that go into theming made a generous contribution to the jump in rankings of a couple of "worth nothing" pages I'd basically forgotten all about.

Those insignificant pages, one PR4 and one PR5, are now on the first page out of about 600K pages, while a PR6 site with around 500 backlinks and a PR6 site with about 1500 backlinks dropped way down. Those other sites are actively promoted, but unlike the 2 little dark horses there are none of the factors that go into themes applied on them. And BTW, the PR4 page shows no backlinks at Google and the site itself has only about 3 external sites linking to it altogether - all with a similar, though minor, factor in common. They're roughly related in theme.

>elements of it could already be in play for all we know.

Dante, maybe not in the actual calculation of Page Rank, but supportive of it in determining the relevancy of the page that's the origin of any given link. That's exactly what happened with those two pages, with a site they link to, which is 100% relevant (and themed) sitting in #1 and 2 positions for that same search.

Since I first saw the paper on term vector databases, I've never been able to get it out of my head, and still go back and read it periodically - again just this past week. There was another paper that got little attention, on identifying web communities - definitely worth another read, because in the natural course of things certain identifiable "communities" of like sites do tend to link back and forth with each other quite honestly and naturally.

Linking within logical communities, combined with incorporating the elements that go into theming, might just be the way to do "safe SEO" because that combination is not easily contrived or forced.

Added:

Whoa>>Themes equate to what category you are in for DMOZ and/or Yahoo.

The sites linked to from any given DMOZ category represent a collection of sites that are a "community" of like sites. Categories that are horizontally positioned within the same higher category grouping are loosely related. Not identical in the sense of a specific community, but in proximity, roughly in the same broader neighborhood.