Only on-theme links count.

or so it appears....

[glengara]

I keep a fairly beady eye on the industry here in Ireland.
During the last couple of updates most sites have 'lost' links,with the ones left showing pretty relevant to the theme.
Seems to me G is tightening-up its theme/relevance filter for links.

[mfishy]

Actually I meant a link from Yahoo home page. Obviously the directories are a slam dunk for Google.

[bcc1234]

I think people overrate the importance of Yahoo and DMOZ.
My site is not listed in Yahoo and was marked as an SMC reseller in DMOZ.

Somebody even suggested that I should throw away the domain and start from scratch.

Two months went by and I have PR6 and about 1.5k daily google-n-friends referrals.

I'm sure I would get more traffic if I were listed in Y and D, but I have other sites that are listed and only get about 200 daily referals.

[europeforvisitors]

Actually I meant a link from Yahoo home page.

Hey, if I could get a link from the Yahoo home page, I wouldn't care if it was on-theme or not. :-

[BigDave]

Themeing will not affect PR, but PR can affect themeing. Themeing WILL make PR less relevant though.

Google will not penalize you for having links from a site that appears to be off theme, but they will give you a bonus for links that appear to them to be on theme. Of course it will end up being a defacto penalty if you do not get on theme links, if your nearest competitors do get them.

The trick, as someone mentioned earlier, would be to create an intermediary page that would cover the transition.

Cruise ship > Dental surgery
would be bad.

Cruise ship > Cruise ship medical services > Dental surgery
would be good.

The link: command has noting to do with what is counted towards your PR. It is a list of backlinks that Google has decided to show you, according to a specific list of criteria. Just to mess up SEOs, they could decide not to show backlinks of PR6 in December if they want.

[Beachboy]

Reading all the posts has me wondering about something. Yes, I believe some sort of theming isn't a big reach for Google, and I think it's been put into place already.

Consider, for example, the well publicized recent "go to hell" kw phrase and Microsoft matter. I think if the MS target page had the phrase "go to hell" in it then all those text links containing that phrase would count toward ranking for that phrase.

And so my question is, do you believe "theming" at Google goes beyond anchor text in outbound links? Some of you are saying it's the kw's on the link origin page, not just anchor text in the link, that will cause a link to count over at the target page. Comment?

[mayor]

I doubt Google's PhD think tank members are playing tiddly-winks. And I'll bet they're pouring a lot of resources into theme labeling of sites and pages.

I just can't understand why anyone would want to have links from non-relevant (or unrelated non-complementary) sites, except to spoof Google. Useless links bring useless traffic. A link campaign for relevant and complementary traffic is easier to run than one for non-relevant and non-complementary links because webmasters being approached for a link swap are not hard to convince when they see they can get a direct benefit of targeted traffic from the exchange.

If Google is indeed cranking up the weight of relevant links I'll be a happy person because ever since the era of link farms I've been going after nothing but relevant links. I don't have a lot but they are top quality links that send me highly targeted traffic long before the search engines kick into gear. Quality link exchanges provide instant and long term gratification, and they don't cost a penny.

[BigDave]

Don't think keywords when it comes to themeing, think all the language used. New Age sites will not have a lot of common language with a car dealer. but there will be some similarity with some alternative medicine sites. and the alternative medicine site will have some similarity to western medicine sites.