The way I see it, for something to be relevant you must be able to read and understand the body of a page. Since were human we can read a block of text and understand that it says and put a topic on it. But everyone seems to say that relevant links are the way to go, when surley google can't read and understand 2 pages and see if they are the same. This is why I am sure that it can't play much of a role in SERP's.
Not bull. Google can certainly find the relevance of two pages both by inbound link anchor texts and on-page text.
Well at the moment I have built as many relevants as I can up to now. But most are not and my results are going quite well. http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=free+online+store&start=10&sa=N 51 million results. Page 2 half way down. Thats with a 1 month and a half domain age with simply link building. Not got alot of content and homepage is a comming soon page.
A simple way to do it is to look at the anchor text. If it says 'Miami Yacht Rental', and goes thru to your 'v1ag5a' site, it isn't very relevant. How to determine the 'theme' of the site the link points to? It's done on a page by page basis, and uses the same technology contentboss uses to 'paraphrase'. You can paraphrase down to a single most relevant word, if you want to, and the algo to do that isn't particularly complicated (though it can be resource intensive depending on the amount of text).
51 million search result might not mean a lot of traffic and competition always. your term "free online store" gets searched 9900 times in a month on average on google. that is including google partner sites meaning actual google searches per month is lot lower. being second page down for this term will hardly give you any traffic and you can see that by checking analytics. you need to be on the top of first page to get some traffic for this term. more searches there are for a keyword, more profitable the keyword is usually so low searched terms are lot easier to get ranked for. to make long story short, relevant backlinks DO help and you will need lot less links if they are quality relevant links
Are you missing my point, the point I was making is that you can still rank ok without all relevant links. I wasnt saying page 2 was good or bad, just saying my search result is going up.
Since I posted that about 2 or 3 hours ago, its just updated and I have moved to the bottom of the first page.
I think if google can tell it is completely relevant than it gives it a little more juice. I do not think Google can tell exactly what each page is but they have somewhat of an idea if it is not relevant or if it is very relevant. I think many times Google puts out things such as the inbound links can hurt you if they are bad (why would they you can't control who links to you) and that it must be relevant or it doesn't count (to discourage people from randomly placing links). Of course from the meta tags on the page, anchor texts, and text on the page they can tell but as far as a whole website I don't think I would put ALL my weight into this thinking it was going to be magically increased dramatically if I post on a somewhat relevant page.
Relevant link plays key role for sure. I believe in theory as no link is bad link, however relevant link counts more. So from my experience it is indeed possible to rank for average terms with quite few non relevant links, however to rank for competing terms, you have to have relevant links.
Do you really think that Google can't "read" a page to see what it is about? Have you never seen a page with Google adsense on it, that has relevant ads based on what the text is? Come on now.... Whether or not relevant links are WORTH that much more, is to be determined... but Google can for sure determine relevance.
hahhahaha .... i agree with Breakaway11 If adsense(recognize) and they put relevant links, I'm sure that google can to.
Of course relevant links are the way to go.... The words on a page are everything in SEO, you have to get "Votes" from other websites, or links... When a website that isn't relevant to your site gives you a vote, it is not as effective as a relevant site giving you a vote. A link tells Google that your site is good enough for another website to link too.... So if other relevant sites are linking to you, then your site must be relevant to those sites content, so your rankings will do better in that niche! Hope that makes sense to you.... Good Luck!
The way I look at it is relevant: 2 points not relevant: 1 points spam/link farm: 0 points Of course there are no points in google system just for purposes of showing from what I have seen how they grade the links. So the relevant ones gain more, not relevant just count as a regular backlink, and the ones on websites that are full of spam or have a large number of outbound links are just not counted.
Remember trustrank? I think thats coming back or already in use. I have a site that did very little, then I got a linkback from one of the top 10 sites on the internet and WOW my SERPs exploded. Instantly I went from off the charts to #1 position. There is a lot of influence on relevancy and the legitimacy of the website. Focus on quality links, that's where all the value is.