Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
When google analyzes a website to rank a site does it look at all the words that are on all the pages of the website or just the words of the page he is trying to rank ?
Let's say I have on my homepage the word "abc" throughout the homepage and then on one of my subpage i have only the word "dfg"
If I want to rank on the word "abc" should all my website talk about "abc" including subpages or is the fact of having "dfg" on a subpage going to penalize me for ranking on "abc"
Thank you,
I look at it like this. I have a site about widgets, 1,000 pages primarily aimed at widgets. Each page is about a particular aspect of wigets, green ones, round ones, making widgets, etc. A couple of my pages on that site are about an apparently disconected subject, e.g. plankton. The reason that a couple of plankton pages are there is because they are the source of the material which is used to make widgets.
I have loads of these "disconnected" pages, all written well and in the same style as the base widget pages. But they don't rank for plankton. My guess is that Google can't connect palnkton and widgets and therefore the plakton pages are considered as less value.
So link text is also variable.
Google probably has the largest document/term colocation index ever. So I'd be surprised if it didn't (statistically) 'know' that widgets were made from plankton.
The plankton pages are indexed right?
If dfg is not 'naturally' related to 'abc' then Google may think you have a collection of unrelated pages and not a themed website.
That technology was created by Anna Lynn Patterson, who then left Google to begin her own search engine, Cuill. It's something like Google's way of measuring term co-occurence, a kind of semantic indexing. It picks up a lot more relationships than a simple "stemming and synonyms" routine can.
Yes, if widgets are always made of plankton, I'm pretty sure Google knows about that relationship, at least semantically.
But Google also seems to understand a sites "keywords" and rewards with better SERPS when those are entered.
Sure, but thats due to relevancy signals, where IBLS are more valuable if they have good anchor text, and come from a related page- its conceptually similar to your internal linking. Thats what makes thematic planning and proper structure so powerful.
Your 'plankton' pages are not "authorative" on plankton, simply because you aren't going to be getting IBLs from other sites for plankton (who would presumably link to a plakton-specialist site). So low PR, and no on-the-nose relevancy from the internals.
@OP
Its the URL that ranks, not the site. However, the site is likely to be the major source of 'context' that G picks up, so theming and structure are likely to be critical factors.
My findings indicate that Google groups keywords. If your site is an authority on widgets it would likely return pages containing most or all of that keyword group. On the other hand if you go off topic from your usual content and write a great article about something not related it will rank but likely not as highly.
It's not that simple, other factors are involved, but you get the idea.
