Lots of Content, But Irrelevant Indexing

Keywords, Meta tags Etc.

[smilinjack]

Greetings,
I know it is advised against, but sites that are loaded with with content that may not be relevent and redundent seem to get returned on search results.

Any thoughts?

[rogerd]

Smilinjack, that's kind of a general question. (No, please don't provide specific searches!) By and large, SEs are getting better at determining what sites and individual pages are about. Google's Adsense is a good example of how well this works (most of the time).

Usually, more content means more accurate search results. I.e., a site with a thousand pages of text about widgets is more likely to be accurately indexed for widget searches than a one-page site whose only spiderable text is a link to the web design firm (to provide a fairly ridiculous example).

Keywords and other meta tags aren't usually enough to seriously skew how a page is indexed.

Outbound linkage is currently one way sites do get mis-indexed. In Google's case in particular, outbound links are one of the factors used to determine what a page is about. Hence, one can sometimes find sites showing up based solely on a link that is unrelated to the main page content. And, of course, inappropriate INBOUND linkage can confuse the SEs as "Googlebombing" examples have shown.

Nevertheless, I wouldn't draw any conclusions from your limited sample - plenty of content about the topic of interest is still one of the best ways to be found for that topic (and usually not other topics).

[smilinjack]

Thanks Rogerd!
Despite what I hear about a "Google Goonsquad" issuing a dragnet for me, it seems the more the merrier when it comes to this.
I am not clear on the linking aspect you spoke of.
Other than my other sites who would I be linking to?
Certainly not my competitors; or can I?
As this may be beneficial can you give me the specifics or direct me to where it can be found?

Regards,
Jack

[mgream]

I'm going to offer a counter-opinion: it may seem like a good idea to add a lot of irrelevant content to your site merely to attract more visitors, but hopefully this isn't at the expense of relevance and clarity in search engine results for the rest of us while looking for unrelated material. We have well developed concepts of physical pollution, some on visual pollution, but not yet any on information pollution. While the search engines work hard to ensure relevance and clarity, it's only made more difficult if they are locked in an arms race doing so. As a matter of professional and civic responsibility, it's always good to bear in mind the total impact of anything we do.