randle - 5:26 pm on May 25, 2006 (gmt 0)

Its all about links; always has been with G, always will be. They are raising the game with them well beyond just taking anchor text at face value. In fact it’s gone from links being the foundation of where you rank to now using them to determine if they want to even crawl your site. Relevancy is a core issue, but probably more sophisticated than just sites of a similar nature, or sites that sell complimentary products. That’s a little like saying people who wear similar clothes are of the same ilk. You need to look at things like ancestry, culture and age.

It does make some sense that they would look to put your links under a nice bright light and really take a look at who you are. You need to do a lot of proving to Google these days, even to get your site indexed, and G will always put a lot more stock in your links than your content. In their eyes, the links prove the merit of the content, so now they want to prove the merit of the links.