google counting off topic backlinks.....

Did anyone see sites "not" getting a boast from having lots of links from..

[teeceo]

Off topic incoming links? It looks like to me that google was just giving up pr and slerp's to "all" links but now it looks like the links have to be "on topic" with the site to affect the slerp's and also, It doesn't look like you can just get 10,000 links from "1 or 2 websites" and get great slerp's and high pr(but I may be wrong?). Am i seeing this right or is everything still the same as it was 3 months ago? Later.

teeceo.

[DaveN]

Not seen it teeco, see some sites ranking really well without one themed link but hundreds of non themed ;)

DaveN

[MHes]

Hi

From reading other threads, it would appear the last update had a significant drop on some peoples traffic,and a loss of pr.

We in fact have increased..... (smug expression falls onto Mhes face) ;)

I think this could be one of two things:

1) Downgrading of detected links pages with endless recipricol links

2) Off theme links. A page with no mention of widgets linking to a widget site (which is recipricated) is hardly a great endorsement.

No proof, just a hunch. We have concentrated on getting on theme links, which is a lot harder because the other site will evaluate your site a bit more closely,

[teeceo]

"2) Off theme links. A page with no mention of widgets linking to a widget site (which is recipricated) is hardly a great endorsement."

Would that be a (page) with "no mention of widgets" or a (site)? some sites are on topic but, the "page" that links to you doesn't have the ward "widgets" on it but, ot has it all over the site. Just a though.

teeceo.

[MHes]

I always think that google just works on a page basis and only thinks in terms of a 'site' when considering internal navigation links. I suspect internal links have a different set of rules applied.

So, 'theme' is based on the theme of a page, rather than a site. This has interesting repercussions, as a poor links page may have very varied themes and no continuity, making the links out worth less. Having said that, the theme of a page may be evaluated in a very simplistic way, e.g. title, h1 etc. so if you have a widget link with widget in the title of the page, thats a good link. Any links out that do not mention widgets and/or do not go to a widget page are more or less ignored.

I guess.....

[teeceo]

What if said site is about "Harry potter" and the links going to it are from book stores and libraries(some with the "term in title and all that stuff" and some without) but, clearly these are on topic links (with or without the book being all over the page) what then? Anyone?

teeceo.

[sachac]

What if the site was about Caribbean Flowers and you get a link from a site promoting Jamaica, that would surely have a lot of relevance with no reference to "Caribbean" or "flowers".

[DaveN]

on the harry potter theme what if a student at a PR9 edu site linked to it because it was on his reading list?

or what if you offer a kick back to schools of chocolate wrappers and 10,000 schools link to your chocolate site?

DaveN

[teeceo]

Yea, what about that? Googleguy?

teeceo.

[doc_z]

> It looks like to me that google was just giving up pr and slerp's to "all" links but now it looks like the links have to be "on topic" with the site to affect the slerp's

So far I haven't see any evidence for this.

Also, as already mentioned, this would cause problems. To give one more example: would this imply that only other search engines can transfer PR to Google while a link from a 'normal' site doesn't count?

I think that Google haven't implement any kind of topic-realted PR in their algorithm and I would be hard to do this. Also, I'm not sure that this would make sense at all.

> It doesn't look like you can just get 10,000 links from "1 or 2 websites"

In my experience this seems to be true.

[MHes]

I suppose the crunch question is:

If a page about 'books' links to a page about 'Harry Potter', is this more beneficial?

I think yes, if the anchor text contains the words 'books on Harry Potter' . The words are on theme for both sites. The 'books' word will be taken very seriously if that page has the word in the title etc. and the 'Harry Potter' words will reinforce the theme of the Harry Potter page.

Likewise for the other examples.

PR9?..... pr is a total red herring, forget it! If you have pr5+ you are well in the game. The only real benefit of pr is for ranking well on a seriously competitive keyword, but people are no longer searching in such an unsophisticated way, they are using more descriptive phrases.

[DVDBurning]

Anchor text for the backlinks seems to factor in strongly. There is one site that I know of that ranks #1 in the SERPs for a very valuable search phrase, where almost all its backlinks come from several off-theme (adult related) sites. However, the anchor text in these links includes the search phrase.

It seems strange that Google would count 100 links from a single site as strongly as 1 link from each of 100 sites. It also seems that the Google algorithm might consider a page to be on-theme when the only appearance of the widget theme is in the anchor text of the forward link.

[teeceo]

"There is one site that I know of that ranks #1 in the SERPs for a very valuable search phrase, where almost all its backlinks come from several off-theme (adult related) sites. However, the anchor text in these links includes the search phrase."

I know the site well and thats what got me wondering. the only thing about that kw is that it is (basically) a adult kw and maybe the adult theme got picked up by google,i'm not sure. Any one else see this on this update?

teeceo.

[modemmike]

I have submitted several spam reports about this issue ,several times, over several months with no resolve and I understand that the Google people are overwhelmed with reports so the best we can hope for is an improvement in the algo... has GG made any posts concerning this topic?

[pmac]

>I have submitted several spam reports<

In regards to what? Because a site has inbound links?

[ovtech]

teeceo,
You are right.

[modemmike]

In regards to link farms and to be fair I only submitted the report if they are also using other tactics (cloaking etc...)