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If PR7 pages link to your site and their content / theme is totally irrelevant to your site, would this help boost PR and SERPS?
Eg. Your site is about Electronics, and you have a lot of PR7 links from a Fashion site
Please share your opinions and experiences. Thank you.
We go beyond simple keyword matching to understand the context and content of web pages. Based on an algorithm that includes such factors as keyword analysis, word frequency, font size, and the overall link structure of the web, we know what a page is about...
avoid links to web spammers or "bad neighborhoods" on the web
Remember, always look at a proposition from at least two vantage points: Look at the close at hand as if it were from a distance, look at things that are far away as if they were close at hand (swordmaster Musashi). In other words, if you decide that Google is the only game in town (and it isn't), and even if Google does not consider the context of your inbound link (and there's a question of whether they are currently doing it, and to what extent), how do you know they won't add it to the algo in the future with the result that your website is blown out of the water? To take this thought one step further, How would you ever repair the damage?
These are just a few considerations in regard to a high non-relevant PR link. And I haven't even touched upon Inktomi, alltheweb, altavista, and overture technologies.
as correct as your statements are... my five most profitable keywords are all being beaten this month and last, and I fully expect next, by a network of new sites buying their PR from far outside the content domain.
when the short run lasts more than three or four months, it can get painful only looking at the long run.
of course, nobody knows if Google will consider the context of inbound links in the future. However, why are you assuming that considering only 'relevant' links yields better results?
Eventually, search engines(Google, etc) would get better, no doubt about that. Meanwhile, as a businessperson, there's an issue in regards to the time frame as to 'when' the search engines would get better.
If it is economically feasible to do what 'seems' to be working right now then it is worth the risk, IMO.
Otherwise, people wouldn't bother using practices where we considered unethical. Such as cloaking, doorway sites, keyword stuffing, etc..
Eventually, these sites will be caught and filtered, however, from the time the site is in the index to the time that it's removed from the index, have already payed off its investment and possibly made a hefty profit in the process.
These cycle will continue...Search Engines vs. Spammers...simply because there's profit on it.
However, why are you assuming that considering only 'relevant' links yields better results?
Good question. My answer is that the assumption that you refer to is not mine.
The assumption that relevant links brings better results belongs to Ask Jeeves, Wisenut, and to a certain extent the AdSense program, and quite possibly Google (read below).
I've stated this elsewhere, but, at the recent SES conference, a Google panelist insisted that they were already deprecating non-relevant links. To what extent this is actually being done (guestbook links,anyone?) or even the truth of her statement, can be debated forever.
I'm just throwing this out as food for thought. I'm not representing my statements as the final word on the algo, or the only way to optimize.
whenever and if ever, if not already that patent kicks in, it would take care of some of the above.
In general take every link you can get, even better if the anchortext is good, even better if its related or on topic. For now or for the future.
Take a completely non-commercail site dedicated to an outdoors activity in a geographic region. The following links out from it may well seem "irrelevant" to an algorithm that relies on ODP categories (or something similar), but are in practice higly relevant:
As Ask Jeeves calls it, the
Subject-Specific Popularity. The amount of incoming page links that are related to the subject matter at hand.
This ain't new, and all the engines hve been using this technology for years. However they have also been using popularity technologies, as in site visit rate's that, have been focused on traffic throughput of a site and connected sites, without any concern of topic - i.e. Direct Hit.
Google, certainly seems to me to be alot closer to the related-communities view of the web, than to a pure popularity (association) contest.
I concur with Martini, that highly specialised tightly related website's can kill sites with PR double of the site. A careful execution of strategy mixed with ultra-specific linking wins hands down on the key-words, as G views the web.
However i would not always say this is the case in extremely competitive area's where related communities can come in a vast majority of cases, such as a term like 'insurance' - can link demographically, medically, economically, financially - loads of ways of picking up tight linking - if the site is designed structurally to encompass it.
Hence. think site structure -> content structure -> related links & pr
So is a link from a hiking site to a museum off topic? That seems very hard for a dumb computer to decide.
Whoops, looks like caine is a faster typer. Well, for what it's worth, here's a view of community building.
Ask Jeeves looks at the online communities that are formed by link patterns. Visualize a cluster of communities, all related to the outdoors, all interlinked, in one way or another, to each other. You will find the hiking site, camping site, hunting site and the weather site within this super-cluster of communities.
Now, within this super-cluster, there will be smaller clusters (or neighborhoods), all linking directly to each other. These neighborhoods can comprise Camping site communities, Hiking site communities, Hunting site communities.
They all come together in an outdoor topic super-cluster because some Hunting Sites will link out to Camping Sites, BUT, the majority of the Hunting Site links will be shared Hunting to Hunting, Camping to Camping, Hiking to Hiking.
This is what is meant by Relevant Links. Who you link to, and who links to you, determines what cluster of websites you belong to.
Imagine what a FFA cluster would look like if a search engine were looking at neighborhood clusters.
Here are some related questions to consider:
[edited by: martinibuster at 3:30 pm (utc) on Sep. 16, 2003]
How do I get a good result?
Matching page relevance with anchor text pretty much throws the baby out with the bath water. My site is about tornadoes..my link to hurricanes is no good? How about a site about corn linking to a green bean site or a site about baseball linking to umpires.
I think the process starts with finding a good result, to weed out the relatively few who exploit link text is probably a manual thing, I doubt the algo will ever do it.
[webmasterworld.com...]
real-world expose' - well if they can figure that one out there a better whatever than i am.
seriously though, GG's making a strong comment for both website popularity and also for related linking, hence a case for both together, which obviously makes sense, who wants to top out the SERPs with no traffic, and who wants to have shed loads of traffic for nothing that they are trying to sell.
Getting tight with tight-related-linking and content is the key to a good overall strategy.
Though here comes the biggy what is a related link too your site?, this is where i feel most fall down, imagination and implimentation of a good linking strategy can help in the general scope and sub specialisation of a site. Personally i am up for building a community if it does not exist, in which it centre's at my site, drawing in loads of intricate relationships that are shared between related links. Rather than have a PRn linking reciprocally that skews the algo's of G and the others into thinking that there is a real life relatedness between the subject matters.
As it stands now, Marcia is correct that there seems to be no real penalties for linking to unrelated sites with high PR, unless they are on a list, or your industry is capped by the algo's.
Yep, The SE's can read, but they just don't *understand*.
As it stands now, Marcia is correct that there seems to be no real penalties for linking to unrelated sites with high PR
I think there is a real problem with members of WW where they are always thinking in penalty mode, as compared to bonus mode. And even worse, they seem to think that the penalty is always related to PR.
I would expect that relevant (in-neighborhood, or whatever you want to call it) links would give you a bonus, but links that appear to be from unrelated neighborhoods will still give you the standard boost.
In fact, I think that your site will probably do better, on the engines that have given it much thought, if you have a mix of most links from within your neighborhood, and several from outside your neighborhood.
If we go back to that outdoor site, if it gets a writeup in the NY Times, or BBC, those off topic links might just mark it as THE entry point to the neighborhood.
As for a site like weather.gov getting links from outdoor sites, if many outdoor sites link to it, it will be viewed as at least related to that neighborhood.
However, I think rewarding based on the existing structure could be misleading. Consider these scenarios:
a) A lone and usual link from a site about apples to a site about oranges. Seems totally irrelevant, right? But the apples site owner thinks the oranges site is really cool--and his visitors agree. The oranges site is getting tons of site referrals.
This is one of those great things about linking. And an apples site owner wouldn't be linking to an oranges site owner if the oranges site wasn't really cool and exceptional. (Leaving aside the question of SEO for the moment.)
b) A blogger posts to the oranges site, because it's so "kewl." Within days there are links to the oranges site from hundreds of blogs. Meanwhile, the oranges site gal, surprised at all the traffic, posts some links back to some of those blogs. Or maybe she has webstats online which end up doing that automatically.
At the next update, the SE's are going to start placing the oranges site within a blogging hub simply because of all the incestuous links--even though there's no true connection. Thus, the "communities" algo has been fooled by the wiles of the "blogosphere."
This is why I have a problem with machine-based relevance as it now stands.
You are right, there are a lot of misunderstandings here. That is because none of use "know" exactly what google or the other SEs are doing. Not even GoogleGuy knows exactly what is going on with the google algo at all times. After looking in to things there, he has come back a little surprised sometimes.
One of the big misunderstandings around here is that people tend to underestimate the hackers at the plex. If you can figure out a possible problem with something in a few minutes, you can be fairly certain that someone at Google has thought about it too.
No matter what they do about figuring out neighborhoods, there will still be cases that do not work out well. And it will suck to be that site. But Google has to worry whether the change improve the index as a whole, not about whether it is being fair to a specific site.
As for your blogging example, if a site is only willing to link back to blogs and not to any other fruit related sites, then they really are more a part of the blogging community. They become the Bloggers Favorite Orange Vendor. They don't deserve to do as well as the sites that choose to participate in their own fields as opposed to those that are all over the place.
I would expect that relevant (in-neighborhood, or whatever you want to call it) links would give you a bonus, but links that appear to be from unrelated neighborhoods will still give you the standard boost.
I find this much more logical.
Your site is about Electronics, and you have a lot of PR7 links from a Fashion site...
dazzlindonna, benc007 is talking about a lot of links, not just one. If it's just one here and another there, I don't really see a problem with that.
But when you're talking about a large quantity of off-topic links, then you're walking into a gray area, if not with Google, then with other search engines.
If benc007 is talking about many links from one site, my advice would be to take just one link then walk away- and don't look back.
as i said in my earlier posts today, i do agree with you, and reading the posts, that purport not too agree with you, seem also to agree in the crux of their arguments. worth a re-read of the thread.
Personally unless its directly related subject, im not interested - reciprocal links for me are meant to be beneficial for the user, related to the subject, not just some questionable junk that raises an eyebrow as in why its there.
give me 10 pr4's from related sites, rather than 1 pr7 from a unrelated site. Adding to injury, i usually link out with no return to high PR site's to increase the hub feature of a particular site, i.e. maybe your surfing through though if i provide access to the relevant goodies, one day you maybe looking for what i sell - word of site - word of mouth - people remember just the same, hence filling a site with high PR but junk links ain't on.
martinibuster - I am talking about getting many unrelated PR7 links from one or two sites to link to me without having to link back. It seems a lot of my competitors are using this strategy and are getting away with it. It will definitely take awhile for SEs to figure out what is relevant is what isn't. SEs would have to develop some kind of artificial intelligence and I think that's awhile away.
"As it stands now, Marcia is correct that there seems to be no real penalties for linking to unrelated sites with high PR"
caine - this definitely seems to be the case.
bigdave - I think I have to agree with you here.
I haven't seen any hint so far that topic plays a role.
I've read that Google does consider the title and heading text of pages that link to yours. I don't know that other context related factors are considered when calculating the effect of inbound links.
My objection to the use of pagerank has always been the same. It is very easy,as Marcia has stated,to "play pagerank like a fiddle". All you have to do is find cooperative sites with high pr to either give or sell you a link to gain position. In recent months that doesn't seem to remain true. I have index pages with PR as low as 2 ranking higher than pages with higher PR. There are other factors which make my pages more relevant to the search than just the rank of pages with links to mine. I,for one,am glad to see that.
Google strives to maintain as objective a system as possible. Just as "machine" politics severely smeared the "democratic" system in the late 1800s,"Pagerank" politics attempt to skew the ranking results in Google. That has to be addressed and dealt with. Google should have never published the pagerank spec and never included the pagerank indicator in their toolbar. It was just an invitation to corrupt the system by overemphasizing pagerank. Pagerank has been decreasing in relation to other factors that determine SERP position in an attempt to deal with those who choose to manipulate pagerank in order to gain higher ranking in the SERPs.
I'd like to see context based ranking. It's just a question of how to code the software to evaluate pages based on context. I don't see how it could be done. A page on motorcyle maintenance is also of interest to people in other fields that involve all sorts of machines and equipment. It could also interest dealers and distributors. How are you going to determine the relevance of a link from a lawm mower repair shop/dealer to an page on motorcycle maintenace using program code?
It is very easy,as Marcia has stated,to "play pagerank like a fiddle". All you have to do is find cooperative sites with high pr to either give or sell you a link to gain position.
That's what effective SEO amounts to now in certain markets, in increasing numbers. Knowing where to buy the links.
You can play PR like a fiddle, and the same goes for other parts of it, for when PR isn't all that critical. Google is very musical. ;)
>>>In recent months that doesn't seem to remain true.
Not so, it still is true; I've been seeing them in searches that normally are the types who would buy text advertising for PR.
We'll be waiting for you to come back and tell us how you are finally number one because of your fistful of irrelevant links.
Seriously and on the level, I really want to hear, a month from now, that your irrelevant links have pushed you into Search Engine Nirvana. You owe it to the membership to report your results, in the same spirit of sharing that we have contributed to this thread.
No offense intended, just offering my opinion, but I doubt I'll see you there because it takes more than simple shortcuts to get there.
