Is incoming text all that counts?

More than just important?

[joempie]

My widget competitor is at position 5 for 'widget' in google. They do not have the word widget anywhere, not in url, not in meta tags, not in alt tags, zero dot nothing. Not even widgeting or gadget.

My own site has the same (toolbar) pagerank 6 and has about 15-20% 'widget' (title, h1, text, alt), 3% gadget etc, but is on position 197 ...

I'm puzzled. It really looks like you can ignore everything but the (number and) text of incoming links.

Anybody know more about this?

[ciml]

Is it all that counts? No. Does it count a lot? Yes.

If you look back at the original Google papers (esp. "The Anatomy of a Hypertextual Web Search Engine" by Google founders Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page) you'll see that the ability to find a document without the words appearing in the text was an important feature from the start.

Still, on-page factors do have a role. For most sites it's not so important for the (well linked) home page but more important for the money pages [searchengineworld.com] within the site.

[dauction]

Yes , joempie it seems that is all that matters. I am inthe same boat , websites as releveant as possible without spamming to any search request ..but I am being beat out by 90% of webpages that have nothing to do with the search request.. but they sure have alot of links..

This last update be the snot out of me , I have ignored the hell out of crating a linking strategy because for the most part linking has nothing to do with providing decent results to the searcher and everything to do about crating page rank ..

I'm tired of trying to provide relevent material.. it's all going to be about links from now on..

[joempie]

Thing is, i have been creating high quality content since 1996. In the beginning it was mostly about blue-metal-gadgetboxes, but these days it's more about widgets in general.

I got all my important links in the early days, and so most of them still link to me with the wording 'blue-metal-gadgetboxes' or similar. should i now go ask 100s of people to update their links? not feasible...

So for me, the importance of incoming link text is completely overrated.

I hope some google-guys are reading this :-)

[sem4u]

It can be very important for the most competitive sectors.

<snip>

[edited by: Marcia at 7:20 pm (utc) on Feb. 24, 2004]
[edit reason] No specific searches, please. [/edit]

[joempie]

What's also strange: the page surrounding me on place 197 all have PR 3/4/5 and I have 6 with much better keywords, titles, content etc.

2 weeks ago, i was still on place 85 and moving up. All I did since then is optimize. I just can't explain it...

In yahoo I am on position 7, 15 in altavista, 24 in hotbot, 28 in search.msn. This position 197 in google just doesn't make _any_ sence to me....

Sill very puzzled and looking forward to any hints....

[Hissingsid]

Remember that Google is predominantly page orientated. Anchor text pointing to a page from other pages on your own site therefore has some value in this regard and you can sort that one today.

There's also something relatively new. It is possible for Google to report in the cached page view that the term widget only occurs in links pointing to this page when there are no links containing that term pointing to the page (very recent page no links pointing to it). The page contained an array of semantically close terms though. This is one of the things that convinced me of the semantic element in the algo.

Best wishes

Sid

[joempie]

that was a complicated sentence. i still don't quite understand it after 3 reads.

well anyway, i just saw that google has me nr 1 and 2 for widget info & widget news, so that's not too bad either :-)

[ronin]

I'm tired of trying to provide relevant material.. it's all going to be about links from now on..

Sorry to lose one of the purists, dauction >;->

I've only ever participated in about ten link exchanges and I've requested a link a couple of times only when I thought my site was a really good match for a directory.

The result: just under 2400 inbound links in 18 months to lots of different pages on my site by concentrating on creating original content that seeks to be useful enough that readers want to bookmark it and other webmasters want to link to it... and leaving it up to them.

But then I've always seen creating a website as halfway between writing a book and writing a magazine and I don't live in a high speed commercial world.

I'm not doing too well in the SERPS now either, but I'm damned if I'm going to start begging for links.

[AthlonInside]

Links are the BACKBONE of Google Technology.

But ever since Florida, it is not as easy as getting some links and you will rank high.

They have some kind of filter/algo that pick and ignore (or even block from appearing in SERPs) certain keywords if they think the link is unsuitable. This is what I am more interesting on.

[the_nerd]

@sem4u,

just tried the link you suggested, then typed the keyword in directly. Then tried again using the same keyword without the last "s", and guess what: same rank, same fresh date, but different page description in the SERP.

[BallochBD]

Regarding incoming text you may be interested to read this thread from message 56. [webmasterworld.com...]