Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Well backlinks are updated - thats fine :)
But i can see something new!
related:www.yoursite.com - now the "related" section has been updated and more accurate. It seems like that google did some changes to "related:" command :)
It looks like google relates your website with others by your keywords that you are targeting & old way backlinks.
[edited by: tedster at 3:29 am (utc) on Aug. 25, 2006]
Before you could find meaningful, similar type pages and sites. Now they are usually not related, and you see a lot of "6 of 9" or no results at all.
Why they make useful things then turn them to poop is pretty weird. Why they even spend any resources on the link command now is even weirder, since it is a deliberate act of misinformation.
Now It has no sense at all......
Try the search with www.webmasterworld.com
I checked one of my sites, and I saw 100% "related" sites. All esults are really related to my niche.
A few months ago, the related: command was yielding bizzare results (for example, it showed sites where there is a link to my site on the footer area.)
I do not see an improvement searching:
related:www.webmasterworld.com
mattcutts.com is showing a strange result to, 1 listing, not in english.
Before I'd usually seen related:example.com, example.com #1 unless the site had a filter or penalty of sorts.
Among the sites which are "related:" to the company I work for are:
google.com
yahoo.com
msn.com
wordpress.org
blogger.com
I've never seen anything like it in related results. It looks as though they are using Alexa's results for "... Also Visit ..."
using the related option for My site it returns 31 other sites that are indeed related - well done google spot on, cant fault they are other sites on a similar theme. (related in so much that they carry content of a similar theme and if it was a directory you would expect these sites to be in the same cat.)
However, if i go to relatedsite1 and try the search, my own site is not returned in the list - so am i to assume that google thinks that a) is related to b) but b) is not related to a)? - My point being that a surely if a site is related in Googles view, it should be related full stop both ways!
Meanwhile, i notice that on some sites Google returns sites that are related to them in so much that they are from the same owner - Could this be googles way of discounting links from own sites?
Finally, i lost backlinks in this update 30% for one site 8000 down to 5000 - Ouch!, yet more sites are linking to the site, so dont get it!. I have noticed however that Google has dropped some pages since the infastructure rolled out in Jan due to cannonicals and other issues, so do you think this loss of links is as a result of the lost pages that would have had internal links on them?
Any thoughts appreciated
Rich
It seems that this has changed. My impression is that the new related command is (also) content based.
Matt Cutts and GoogleGuy have already confirmed this multiple times in the last few days. See
[webmasterworld.com...] and
[webmasterworld.com...] and several others.
I instantly recognised that list of sites (A to F inclusive) as being the complete list of outgoing links recently seen on site Z, which I had browsed just a few days before.
