To some degree perhaps. But language is so elusive, I imagine it would be nearly impossible to theme a site just by analyzing the text.
Its more likely that too many links with the same anchor text was probably the cause. Google cannot tell whether a link has been purchased or not unless it is some thing like a sitewide.
I agree, like how would they theme the new york times, (it talks about everything). but for more niche sites it is feasible I think.
I thought this was obvious? If backlinks can be good for your site by gaining a better SERP from relevant backlinks, then it's going to work the other way too. If I have a site about cars, and I get ALL my backlinks from a site about science, Google will associate my site with science, obviously. As far as Google punishing the paid links people, I don't think they'll ever be able to stop it as it's so widespread and hard to detect. Sure there might be specific media hyped cases in the future where they try to prevent people by going after a huge site which offers links, but who's to stop me from buying a link from my friends website? They also don't take into account the fact that most web users don't know what Page Rank is, and so selling links seems perfectly legit. If you ask me, it's similar to the RIAA/MPAA battle, they target high profile cases for media hype and hope everyone follows, it just doesn't work like that.
This is one reason search engines are not perfect and not 100% relevant. After reading Matts Cutts paper on Googles algo and how their bots sort data, the way I preceive this is that with your on page text, title tags, meta descriptions, how many times a subject phrase is used on the site as a whole and a host of other factors, the Bot will determine what the theme of the site is about. If you are trying to get a link on a site using the anchor text blue widgets and this site doesnt contain any onpage text, title tags, meta descriptions or any other factors the bots look at to determine relevancy, then IMHO no weight is given to that link. If that anchor text link is placed sitewide, I believe this might cause a penalty to the site receiving those links or at very least no weight given and delute the theme of the site placing those anchor text links.
Did someone say "site wide links"? It is specifically stated in Google guidelines frowning on paid text links. But I think it is ok to buy text links, and if one were to buy links, some common sense questions can be asked first: 1. Site Wide Links: Would I purposely link to someone else on every page of my site because I like them so much? Is it a reasonable natural unpaid gesture? 2. Non-Site wide Links: I bought one link from thousands of sites on different Class C IP's. Am I proud to let search engines know that I got hundreds or thousands of links all at once? 3. Are some of the supplier sites already known for selling text links, or have an "advertise with us" text link section, and they have been expressly penalized by Google? In spite of above, I am not sure if they are enough justification to cause any significant loss in ranking as you have described. It is probably something else... Check the partners you are currently linking to, to see if some of them are banned or have removed their link to your site... No, irrelevant links to your site will not hurt you. If it did, Yahoo can configure billions of irrelevant links to Google to get it to PR0, but I think it will jump to PR11 instead . "You cant control who links to you, but you can control who you link to".
You are missing the point here. Irrelevent links boost your PR I think everybody agrees. However when, as previously stated, 90%+ of your strong links are irrelevent, then this will devalue the quality and theme of your site. Assume you get a PR8 sitewide from a software site while you are selling homes with only few relevent links. Then google will think that you are more related to software then homes and hence you will lose serps not PR. And no you can not ruin a competitor buy linking to them from irrelevent links unless you are ready to spend a lot of money to do so and do this for every competitor. You could end up paying thousands to ruin few competitors while you could use that cash for your own site, even with adwords.
Guys it is important to understand the elements of linking and how it works before jumping to conclusions. There are three elements in a link. 1. Anchor page (the page where the link sits) 2. Target page (the page the link points to) 3. Content of link (the text or code of the link) OK 3. is the bridge between the two pages, and for all intents and purposes it is counted as being on BOTH pages that is to say it is on the anchor AND the target page. This is why anchor text is so important. As it becomes on the target page, it can then be checked for link relevancy (content wise). this will give you a theme. On to themes. Google has a massive lexicon of semantically related words, this is how a theme works. EG. to the guy who said about new york and theming. If a page has stuff about 'jets' it could be about aeroplanes. If in the same site it has Madison square gardens, NFL, the meadowlands, empire state etc, then ALL of those words are semantically linked to new york, and new York would be the recurring common denominator. That is how semantic theming works. So if the anchor text is semantically linked, say 'Jets information' it would still be on topic to New york. The next stage here could be that if the page holding the link was about Football, and had the link text of 'Jets' it would fall into many themes, football, NFL, new york etc. By comparing the overriding theme of one site(or cluster of pages if it is a large site) an algorithm could work out relevance in the blink of an eye. Please forgive me if I have messed up some of the places as I am from the UK not the US. Hopefully this explains things a little better though. I am not saying this is exactly how it currently works (although I have a feeling this and trust-rank are being applied) I would stake my pension on this being the way it works in the future.
I don't think Google penalizes sites that receive irrelevant backlinks from other sites. There's no way to know for sure which link is payed or not. If Google would start ranking sites based on backlinks relevancy... I'm afraid to even think about what would happen with the co-op network or similar solutions.
Old welsh guy, there is no way you could find a common denominator between a software site and a travel site (this the case for the site in question) Mariush, there is a difference between paid and irrelevent. I am saying that they can spot irrelevent links not that they can do the same for paid ones. The coop are not taken into account neither for serps nor PR unless they are static. And if they are static they boost you PR and depending on relevency they can help your serps or harm them (only for huge number of links)
Jeez dude lighten up, take a pill or something where did I say in my post that there WAS a common denominator in your case? My post was made to answer some people who questioned relevancy, and how linking worked etc and to help them understand what was being discussed .
Oh and Matt Cutts stated to my face that Goolge can pretty much detect paid ads, or ads that are likely to be paidlinks etc. Remember that they work on best guesses, so if your a dolphin and don't want to die, don't swim with the tuna is the advice
What do you mean by static ? If the links are at the same place on pages, for example a footer ? The 5 links of the dp co-op are likely do be different each time Google or other search engines crawl the page. How would it detect? Off-topic: Could Google think my site is a link farm because of this links changing each crawl ?
by static I mean permanent. dynamic links are just ignored since they don't pass the time limit for a link to have value. I can't answer your second question as I am not using coop lately and didn't do it for a long time.
Just so I am reading you right, when you say 'dynamic' you actually mean rotating ads (links), or links that might not be on the page everytime Googlebot hits the page right? If this is what you are saying then your absolutely right, as part of the Google backlink benefit is the age of the site and the age of the link. Links will give more link benefit the longer they reside on a page. ( I believe this to be a major part of the sandbox effect) I also believe the sandbox effect to be far more of a complex beast than some have said. I believe there is no 'sandbox filter' I believe it is a series of elements that impact upon link benefit, which simply manifests itself more on new sites as they are more susceptible to the affects.
Guys, you have to step back a little from where you are. as you are approaching it from the wrong angle. Whether the link is paid or not is NOT the issue, google work algorythmically, so ALL they will do is look at the mathematical probability of the link being paid for. *hence my comment about dolphins swimming with tuna and getting caught in a tuna net). Google doesn't care if individual links are paid or not. They run algos that will look for the characteristics of paid links. IE small text, blocked together links with no theme.(read up on block level link analysis for more understanding on this) External links near the foot of the page (internal links would be highly valued as they are treated as a sitemap). If your link falls into these and probably many others, then Google might well decide they are LIKELY to be paid, and as such discount them. You are trying to look at specifics of the link being paid or not, while the algo works on balance of probability, google do not care if money has changed hands. If it sounds like a duck it probably is. As I stated previously, if your a dolphin, dont swim in the tuna pond.