LDA and ranking

[member22]

I have subpage of my website that is ranked 6 th on the 1 st page of google for a specific keyword ( this page has a few external links but it is not a competitive keyword ).

My competitors rank 1 st and 2 nd on google and none of them have external links... How do to they rank 1 st and 2 nd other than by on page optimization ?

I am 99 % sure the reason they rank 1 st and 2 nd of because they have better content than me on the page ... and some tools that I use suggest that.

However my content is not off topic but I guess not as good as my competitors content. I tired to look at what words work well for them and I was able to see which words work well.

However when I try to include those words on my page the lda score doesn't get as good as my competitors, why is that.. there has to be something I missing...

One last thing on Bing and yahoo I rank 1 st so google seems way more advanced at "reading" content... but is there a way to figure out what to feed our good google friend other that build great content...

I consider that I have great content but the it seems that google doesn't have the same words to describe my topic in his box as I have in my box :) Maybe we don't use the same dictionary...

[martinibuster]

One last thing on Bing and yahoo I rank 1 st so google seems way more advanced at "reading" content...

I think it is usually the other way around.

Getting back to your question, what makes you think the other site/page does not have external backlinks?

What is LDA?

[member22]

I know so ... can't explain complicated look on the internet...

[brotherhood of LAN]

Like LSI?

[en.wikipedia.org...]

[tedster]

LDA is a kind of semantic analysis - The initials stand for Latent Dirichlet Analysis. If it seems complicated, I'd advise ignoring it until you've studied enough to have a sense of whether it means anything for you.

There is no evidence that Google's semantic analysis methods use LDA. My best advice is to focus on pages that serve you market as well as you possibly can. Over time, that has a way of carrying a lot of ranking power for you automatically.

[member22]

I agree there is no evidence that google uses it but google has a few patents related to it so my guess is that they are using it.

[BenFox]

Do they have no links to those pages or no links to their domain? How are you checking this fact?

[member22]

No links to this page, for sure links to the domain...

[BenFox]

It is possible for a powerful domain to outrank a less powerful one based on domain wide metrics alone.

[member22]

Ok and what are those metrics you are thinking about...

[BenFox]

There's an old SEOMoz video that covers that kind of thing here How the link graph works [seomoz.org].

I'm sure there's more to it than what's covered in the video (it is a few years old afterall) but it's worth a watch if you're starting to think about domain level metrics

[edited by: tedster at 1:47 am (utc) on Mar 11, 2011]
[edit reason] made the link clickable [/edit]

[member22]

Interesting post but didn't learn much...

[BenFox]

OK but my point was that there are domain level metrics included in the algo.

So even if a certain page doesn't have any inbound links the domain might have such high trust/quality/brand metrics that it might outrank you on that basis alone.

Using that logic I would hazard a guess that getting some high quality inbound links would have more of an effect on your rankings than tweaking the content.

[member22]

I agree with you on the idea ... but the issue I have is that my domain trust is higher overall and for that specific page is also higher than my competitor who ranks higher than me... on the keyword I am targeting.

So that is where the big question is... why...

[MrFewkes]

I think N-Grams are relevant to this topic - I look at them as kind of simpler versions of LSI and LDA.

Maybe google "n-grams" and have a read to see if that might be of use.

[member22]

Never heard about that but it is the reason being ranked on google is absolut luck but that might be what google wants in order to give the best results possible...

[member22]

Isn't N-Grams used more for duplicate content than ranking ?

[MrFewkes]

Member22 - I think its like this (or similar)

If you have a website about saturn, you may want to include things like this

Rings of Saturn
Saturns rings
Rings around saturn

I believe but cant prove - that having a page which contains saturn related n-grams will rank better than a page which is about saturn but does not contain stored n-grams.

I am open to suggestions on this front - definately - because its what I read but havent tested.

[brotherhood of LAN]

N-Grams used more for duplicate content

See shingling [nlp.stanford.edu] for reference.