Define what a relevant link is. I'm no noob when it comes to SEO, and this may seem like a moronic question, but I'm in all seriousness. Is a relevant link JUST defined as 'a link being on a website that has your targeted keywords on it as well' ? Or Is it defined as 'a link from a page that doesn't even have to have the appropriate targeted keywords on it'? For example: Say i have a website all about dogs. I want to target the keyword "Dogs". So let's say I purchase a text link a website all about Cats, having the anchor text read Dogs. Even though they are completely different animal, it's not at all obvious that Dogs and Cats are still very relevant to each other. 1. They usually go hand in hand. If someone is an animal lover, if they love cats then they love dogs. 2. Dogs are in competition with cats. 3. They're both animals. Basically I'm asking: Do search engines have enough artificial intelligence to understand this? And would they see it as relevant?
Search engines use statistical evaluation of page content - so in short - I believe dogs and cats are bound ie There is plenty of content on the web where dog and cat go together.
use common sense, what you find is logical for you and other people - then it is ok. remember you build sites for people, not for search engines.ask - will the user of the cat's site benefit from your dog link?
Of course, I agree with you that my websites for human eyes mainly. However, Google is starting to frown more and more upon irrelevant links. I really think that they will be useless and maybe even hurt you in the future. I'm just doing a little thinking ahead, just so I'm not penalized in the future. I do believe Dog links will benefit on Cat links. So, I guess you're right in saying that if it isn't recognized by Google now, it will be shortly. Does anyone else agree/disagree?
This is exactly what i think. It is always safer to think from human perspective in the long term but here is a possible problem even if you look from human perspective: Lets say i have contextually related web site. The urls are like: x-articles.com y-articles.com z-articles.com ... x, y and z are different words and they are unrelated. (e.g. x=business y=dog ). But obviously the sites contains articles on thsoe subjects! So if i put a left block (conatining all of the links of the sites in this article-network) to all of these sites, google may think that they are unrelated... And obviosuly for users, it is useful to advertise all these sites in a block! In fact for a few sites, this scheme worked perfectly! Even i did not work on any link-building effort, the pr is automatically transfereed tothe new sites!! In fact currently iam working on a larger networ (>20 sites), and i hope i will not get any penalty. What do you think? What is the beavior of Google in the short and long term..?
Yes, this is exactly what I'm referring to. I wonder if Matt Cutts has talked about this before. I'll ask him, if not. I can also say that I have x.com, y.com, and z.com. Each of the three websites are about a different sport. Obviously, any human would not see it out of place to link to other sports websites. However, Google may pick this up as completely unrelated due to its content. This is my dilemma right now.
I think the best advice is to ignore Google (and its inability to truly understand and appreciate natural human languages) and just concentrate on developing the best content for your readers. If additional links to other sports seems like a good idea - do it.
PoohBear88, let me know the answer if you ask him.. Yes, i select this approach but getting some risk since my sites get %90 of its traffic from google.
do a related: query on google,for big site like DP you ll get results like someone hand picked them,for small to medium sites you will get totally absurd results.