Forum Moderators: martinibuster
From my limited perspective the relevancy of links is, well relative.
A starting point
Lets use a site dedicated to antique and classic widgets as an example. These old widgets come in many styles and from many manufactures all around the world. Some are rather plain, functional devices, others are clearly in the luxury prestige category and, having been made in very small numbers originally, are valued accordingly.
Owning, maintaining and operating the antique and classic widgets is an expensive hobby for some. Others are in the business of selling these great old widgets, servicing them, etc. There are also lots of clubs dedicated to these old widgets, or a subset of them.
OK, from my perspective any link between any of the above mention groups could be considered relevant, at least in general.
But wait. Is a link from a luxury prestige old widget site relevant to a site focused exclusively on the preservation of the peoples widget which was manufactured, with modest and incremental improvements, in the multi-millions for over 50 years? I mean the luxury prestige old widget was only made for a few years and in very limited numbers. Can these two sites be relevant to each other?
Now lets go a little farther out.
Well, well..... after wandering around the web for a while the luxury prestige old widget webmaster comes upon a finacial website that is obvisously targeted at folks who have lots of money available, and who might easily be able to afford an old luxury prestige widget.
Should the old widget webmaster try to get a link from the financial site?
Should he link to the financial site?
Does it make sense for the old widget webmaster to ask the financial site for an inbound link while not offering a reciprical link?
Is it more relevant for the finacial site to link to the old widget site than it is for the old widget site to link to the financial site?
Now on to something closer to home.
The folks who own these old widgets love to get together and show their old widgets to other old widget owners and the public.
So the old widget webmaster goes wandering off about the www again and one day stumbles upon a website selling old clothes.
Man! He thinks this would be a great place for his target viewer to find old clothes to wear to events where they show their old widgets!
Is it really releavant fo the old widget webmaster to link to the old clothing site?
What about the old clothing site linking to the old widget site? Is that relevant to the clothing sites viewers?
Even closer to home
In his meandering about the old widget webmaster comes across the site of another old widget webmaster. The sites are very similar in focus, but the differ in the geographical origin of the old widgets.
Among the many old widgets on either site are a few from the others main point of origin.
Would links between these two sites be relevant?
Whoopssss....lost in cyberspace
Our original old widget webmaster, being somewhat short in the attention span department, got lost in cyberspace and wound up visiting Dans' Dishwasher Repair Site.
Dan doesn't even know old widgets exist, nor does he apparent care, but he apparent does know how to build a popular website. On top of that he has only a few out going links from his PR8 home page.
If the old widget webmaster could somehow convince Dan the Dishwasher Repairman to link to the old widget website, would it be a relevant link?
Back on the road again
The old widget webmaster wrote an article for his website about an up coming gatering of old widget owners and thier old widgets.
Would it be relevant for him to go looking for some hotel websites in the city where the event is going to be held and include them in his article?
What about hotels located on the way to the destination city?
Wait...."on the way"? From where? Where does the relevancy start or end here?
And then again...
Does any of this really matter? Is a link from the virtually unknown hammer forging site really less relevant than a link from the world famous old widget club site?
It was mentioned previously to not worry about PR, but in the case of my links they all have a higher PR than my own. Two of them are from an SE where I am very-hard-to-find.
I also like the idea of "partnering" with a link where the common goal is to increase sales. That's something we'll be discussing with our widget suppliers. Those same sort of partnerships once existed with the the current suppliers, but that was long ago and far away.
Suzanne, I tried Googles related keywords, I came up with Old Furniture, but no Office Furniture.
the top positions for a search on my user name
is about a blog screen theme, not very tasty.
then, some other things, because it's been used
as a sig, still inedible.
then finally, vendors of the product.
++++
Grandpa,
Suzanne, I tried Googles related keywords, I came up with Old Furniture, but no Office Furniture.
I don't know what you have tried.. My post was actually a link. That you can click on, you know... ;) And there it says clearly Office Furniture.
I think that the workings of that patent do take relevancy into account to a certain extent. You need a "local score", that is links from pages in the top 1000 of results for a query, to rank high for that query.
My understanding of Google's algo is not very good. And no one can prove whether Google uses the method described in the patent or not. All I can do is hoping that claus has the right understanding of the algo and that I understand his explanation:
So, although you positively know that you have 1,234 inbound links, only the top "k" of these, that are not from "your neighborhood" or even "part of the same neigborhood" will count. Here "k" is (quote) "a predetermined number (e.g., 20)."
and
But not just any inbound links, rather: It is important to have inbound links spread across a variety of unrelated sources.
I also have no idea if Google is actually applying parts of that patent.
They could even let it fade in slowly with weak constants to gradually check effects.
Yes the links should not be affiliated or related, but also:
I hope what I posted in that thread (msg21) makes things a bit clearer.
Lets say a guestbook spammer gets high ranking on a query (oldscore - not necessarily Pagerank) only from totally unrelated sources (not in the initial set of e.g. 1000 results). NewScore would then let rankings for this page drop dramatically because of the multiplier effect from the non-existant LocalScore.What this paper basically says is, for queries you want to rank high for,
focus to get motivated links from pages ranking in the top of the search engine results for that search query.
"Relevancy" fades in. Because you get bonus points for links from webpages that rank high for that same query.
>> spread across a variety of unrelated sources
Here, "unrelated" has absolutely nothing to do with topic or subject. Two sites can be on exactly the same topic (in fact they will probably be, as they both are in the SERPS for that search phrase.)
It's more about who owns the pages [webmasterworld.com].
The thing is, that a link to a page is a "vote" for that page, and you (Google) would not want webmasters to cast more than one vote on your own pages. Also you would not want them to cast more than one vote on somebody elses pages (friends, affiliates, linkpartners, network, etc.)
Related sites are sites that are part of the same "neighborhood of sites" (eg. via ownership or other affiliation, not topic). For all these sites, only one "vote" is counted, and that is the vote from the highest ranked page.
So, it's actually some sort of "network neutralizing" factor, or "quality above quantity" if you like. Or, it's rather hard to find a short phrase for what it does, as it potentially neutralizes both doorways, cloaking, network sites, linkexchanges, etc. (in the perfect world that is - google will need to know about these before they can be neutralized, of course).
>> focus to get motivated links from pages ranking in the top of the search engine results for that search query
That's where topic becomes the topic (no pun intended). You should get links from high ranking pages for the same query, as vitaplease says, but these other pages should not be part of the same "neighborhood" as your own page (eg. not same owner). The exact definition of what constitutes "neighborhood" (is it only ownership or is it more, and if more, then how much more) is Googles decision. Yet another knob to turn, i suppose.
/claus
Otoh, the recent changes in backlinks displayed (PR4+, not my own) might indicate that it is "taking interviews", ie. slowly becoming employed, but then again it could also imply anything else.
I think I get it now. And that's smart from Google, because the links pages are usually not found in the same query as the index pages of a site.
And I think, claus, that this patent is getting mixed in the current algo. I have many, many domains. Before, these were all interlinked. Then one day, they all started to drop from the SERPs. After I removed the interlink, they climbed back.
I don't have any prove for this, but I think that with the current changes going on, the algo is improving and calculations as this patent are being included.
