Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Go to [google.com...] and type in "~your keyword" (without quotes). Search through the first 50 pages or so and take note of all the bolded keywords.
What I've been trying to figure out is how much importance Google places on content-relevant backlinks as compared to off-topic backlinks to your site. I think it's very safe to say relevancy DEFINITELY plays a part in search rankings, but what nobody really knows is exactly how much of a part it plays and how exactly it works. (How smart can a freakin computer be?!)
Using the "~" search (Google calls it the synonym search), do you all think it's safe to say Google uses this system to see whether a link to your site is "related" to your site? For each new link, maybe Google takes your strongest keywords and runs it against the site which linked to you to see if the anchor text/general subject matter of that site can find a match (by using these synonyms), and depending on how related the anchor text AND site content is, Google determines how "important" the link is and thus affects your search rankings accordingly for that link.
Thoughts, anyone?
Dictionary.com definition for synonym:
1.a word having the same or nearly the same meaning as another in the language, as joyful, elated, glad.
2.a word or expression accepted as another name for something, as Arcadia for pastoral simplicity; metonym.
[edited by: tedster at 9:50 am (utc) on Nov. 4, 2008]
For some deeper information about linguistic elements in Google search, see this thread about Google's phrase-based indexing patents [webmasterworld.com].
With somewhere approaching 1 million computers in their total network, they can process a whole lot of data!
