I don't think that theory holds water. The experiment we have been running for 9 mos now and reported daily on in this forum (here) seems to indicate that the "relevency" of the page linking to you has little to do with the value of the link. While the "experiment page" did drop from a PR6 to PR5 in this current BL/PR Update it did not drop significantly as would be expected IF your theory was correct. The "experiment page" is relevent to camping equipment and sleeping bags specifically. It has over 2000 links pointing to it and of those links none have anything to do with camping equipment. Only a few have anything at all to do with "sports". If your theory was valid, I would have expected that 99% of the links pointing to the page would have been counted as junk and the page would not only have dropped significantly more in PR but that it should have dropped like a rock in the serps as well. The page is currently in Position #5 in what has turned out to be a tough category. What our experience seems to point to is that Google has evolved to giving more value to links from different IP addresses. example: 100 links from 100 different urls are more valuable than 1000 links from 10 urls. Last spring "a link was a link". But sometime last summer (late June saw significant changes) Link "values" seemed to start changing. The page we were monitoring dropped from position in the 20s, to the 40s, to the 140s, to the 340s then to nowhere in the results. This is not to say that the links were the only problem as Google was not updating the cache of the page at this time. Once the caching issue was resolved, we still could not seem to push that page into the top 10. The experiment page, at that time, had greater than 2000 links but those links were from only a handful of different IP addresses. Once links were added from many different IP addreses, the page went into the top 10 and has been there ever since. Again, link relevancy or "theme" is almost non-existant in the linking strategy of this experiment. Case in point: November 25 BacKlink Update 3530 Backlinks reported by Google for the page and PR6 the page was then in position #4 in serps. January 1 Backlink/PR Update 267 Backlinks reported by Google for the page and PR5 the page is currently in position #5 in serps. All supporting evidence can be found in this Daily Log You can view a list of many of the sites linking to the page (here) Caryl
While this experiment is quite compelling, I don’t necessarily agree that it contradicts the relevancy theory. Taking a brief look at the backlinks in your experiment, all of those I saw used ‘sleeping bags’ in anchor. My contention is that anchors made the links relevant, and they were therefore included in PR calculations. If we zoom in on a particular link on a particular page, what might make that link relevant to a given keyphrase? My guess is that there are a few attributes, each of which could be measured and weighted on its own to arrive at an overall relevancy rating for the link. 1. anchor text (this is of course a no brainer) 2. surrounding content (close proximity) 3. section / article title 4. page title and topic 5. site theme / topic Let’s assume that if the link had all of these attributes it would be declared 100% relevant. Let’s also assign an importance to each of the attributes, on a scale of 1 to 5 where 5 is most important. To keep it simple, we’ll do it linearly so 'anchor text' is most important with a 5, 'surrounding content' is an importance of 4, and so down to 'site theme' with a 1. Last, let’s assume that to be considered a relevant link, the link must score a total of 5 or higher. In this example, anchor text (100% density) alone could make this link relevant. But, based on my limited experimentation (and based on the scoring examples provided) a combination of section title, page topic, and site theme could also result in a score of 5, thereby making the link relevant. The point is that in this scenario even an anchor of ‘click here’ could be considered relevant if enough other attributes are exhibited. By the way, these opinions are in the strict context of PR. SERPs are obviously based on an extremely complex algo. Also, I too believe that IP ranges play a major role, but that first all links are analyzed for relevancy and then some limit per IP is applied. I have no evidence of that, but as a novice programmer I know that to whittle down a list I first need the list.
So... What you are saying is that ANCHOR TEXT is enough to make a page linking to yours "relevant". Thus the website about Gucci Purses that is linking to the sleeping bag page is relevant simply because the anchor text to us is "sleeping bags". What does the anchor text of one link on a page have to do with the amount of PR that page will contribute to the page it is linking to? It has been commonly accepted for the better part of this last year that Anchor Text is probably THE most important part of any linking strategy. It is hard to believe that many would be caught at this late date NOT using it. So, almost any link out there today would make the linking page "relevant". While much is possible today in evaluating theme and relevance, it is also important to consider the resourses required to deliver such results and to consider whether the value of end result would justify the expenditure or allotment of those resourses. It has become very evident over the last year that Google has devalued PR greatly as far as the serps go. PR is mostly just important to us behind the scenes. It just does not make sense that they would dedicate much effort in that area anymore. Caryl
Can a single link make an originating page relevant? No, I don’t think so. If I implied that, I did not mean to. My suggestion was that the link itself would be relevant to specific keywords, not that it made the originating page relevant. To use the same example, a link with ‘sleeping bags’ might be a relevancy score of 5. But, one needs to look at the target page as well. If the target page were relevant to ‘sleeping bags’ I think the link would be counted. If however, the target page’s primary relevancy was to “oil drilling†I don’t think the sleeping bag link would contribute to PR. The opinion that everyone uses their keywords in anchor text, is not completely true. There are two schools. One is to remain consistent in anchor. The other is to diversify. Many (including me) now use secondary keywords in some portion of our BLs. I’m not convinced that it is a good strategy if one’s goal is to increase PR. By moving to relevancy based PR, (if that is in fact happening) what Google would be doing is saying “We no longer base a page’s popularity on all links. Instead, we measure popularity relative to a topic.†I think that ultimately, a link’s relevancy to the target page will figure into SERPs as well. Doing so would counter the google-bomb. If it were currently in place, Bush’s bio would not be SERP1 for miserable failure, because the page itself does not demonstrate relevancy to the keyphrase.
I don't know if that is what Google is doing yet, although I wouldn't be surprised to learn that this was an attempted step in that direction. Even if this doesn't apply to the current update, I think it's only a matter of time -- Google has shown that they can determine page relevancy -- the only question is when and how they are going to apply it.
I just noticed one of our sites dropped from Allinanchor #1 (for the last couple of months) to #32...BL's listed have nearly quadrupled in the last update....so maybe "relevant" links are getting a boost or internal links with that keyword are getting discounted...or maybe someone at G is just messing with me?
Gregorym, usually when PR and backlinks update, they are extern updates, intern updates cause boucings, so if yours are currently bounching, then probably they are already working on their new update
The PR for our primary site (the one I've been focussing on for optimization) decreased from a PR5 to a PR4. But interestingly, MANY other pages went from a PR0 to having PRs up to 4. I've been focussing on content, and this has had a HUGE impact on traffic. While our primary URL PR went down, the focus on content and Google's "dispersement" of our PR has resulted in a 30+% increase in traffic (6000 visits daily to 9000) over the last two weeks. Many of our BLs for the site are all from one very relevent site we do paid advertising on. Our total BL number went down slightly on Google, but it seems that the new BL scheme Google is now using has negatively effected us. It would appear the "relevence" of the links in this case doesn't play a large role (since the links to us are all highly relevent), but the fact that many of our BL registering with Google are from a single site does hurt us? Please excuse my lack of knowledge to all of this, I'm relatively new at this. But I thought these observations might be useful.
Is anyone done playing the PR game? Last month I deleted the Google toolbar, and haven't checked a PR since. I'm done trying to optimize something like this--it's like trying to shove a 3 foot ball of rock into a 1 foot hole.
It's worth emphasizing these points. Too many people are convinced that on-page SEO doesn't matter to Google, which in my opinion is simply incorrect. Before the flames and rants start, I'm not disputing that the biggest single factor is targeting links, remember two things: (1) Google reads everything it can on a page and this does figure into rankings, and (2) PR and even a top 10 ranking won't mean a damn thing if you can't impress people with the snippet for your page so they'll click through and the actual page when they get there so they'll stick around long enough to consider what you have to offer.
Thank you , Minstrel. I couldn't agree more! 100%. You are one of the few who has been making sense continuously throughout this forum. Mike P.S.: advice to newbies - never simplify something just because you don't fully understand
Well dont know what it is but it seems that google is showing an old index again?? Just after the update i added a minor change in the title, it got spidered and got shown the day after but now it shows the old page again and the date that it got spidered or cachedate has changed as well..
I just checked and the one link all the datacenters have been reporting for my domain the past couple of days is gone from one of them. This makes sence since that link doesn't exist any more. It looks like they may be updating bls again already. I just hope they get all the links that do exist in there this time!
Why are you people still obsessive about the PR? Google has said that the PR is not relevant anymore.