Forum Moderators: open
Allthough my site's is mainly linked from very very on topic pages / sites and from some search engine related directories, it also uses a voting feature where people can comment pages that are listed with the directory - it's called voting.
What conclusions could be drawn now?
- Is the voting part of my directory too dominant compared to the rest?
- Are the links i get from on topic pages too unimportant?
- Doesn't google detect the right theme of my site (quite impossible imho)
- Is the similar pages feature!= theme detection?
- If google messes with the theme of my site, could this mean that the regular search results / positions / rankings of my site are also somehow misinterpreted?
Unfortunately i have the feeling that the above example is a proof of Google's lack of theme detection or theme handling - which would really disturb me since i stuck with themes all the time.
I know, questions about the similar pages feature have been asked a zillion times here allready - but i didn't find anything that could give me a clue about: should i forget and ignore it or should i rework / reinforce the themeing of my site(s)?
The ideas that have been discussed at the thread Google - Find sites Similar to? [webmasterworld.com] sound logic to me but they absolutely don't reflect the linking / theme structure of my site(s).
ciml said:
I see the 'similar' feature as interesting, it maybe gives us clues about how Google could bring themes into their ranking.
... but that was April, 2002 ...
What is your experience with the feature Similar pages of a niche / themed page?
I do not think the similar pages feature of Google is a whole lot more than Ciml's best guess of your referenced thread:
4. Pages that are linked from the same pages that link to you. <- My best guess.
Plus some Pagerank threshold.
If you check some heavy guestbook spammers and check their similar pages, you find their fellow compatriot guestbook spammers. They can be totally unrelated.
related:The query [related:] will list web pages that are "similar" to a specified web page. For instance, [related:www.google.com] will list web pages that are similar to the Google homepage. Note there can be no space between the "related:" and the web page url.
This functionality is also accessible by clicking on the "Similar Pages" link on Google's main results page, and from the Advanced Search page, under Page Specific Search > Similar.
This, however proves nothing either. It just says that the sites are related. To find out exactly how they are related, you would have to do several searches and find the relating factors.
ie A search for "widgets" brought up "www.foo.com/widgets.html"
I clicked on the 'similar pages' and it takes me to a SERP combining searches for domain1 and widgets.
I tried this on several different themes and the same thing happened.
It seems that G just does a search for anything else relevant to the domain that appeared under the term "widgets". It seems to take its new search terms from the domain name only as I found info on a site nothing to do with "www.foo.com" or "widgets", but it did have "foo" mentioned as a completely different subject.
In my book, thats not really a theme.
Which isn't that big of a deal.
