Hi guys, this has been really bugging me. I have a site on building muscle and know I need to find some related links to help my serps but am hesitant as I cant understand how google knows what links are relevant. For example, getting 50 health links is relevant but how does google understand that building muscle is health at all? tom
Only Google knows for certain, but I would guess that they seeded their algorithms with a few simple rules to begin with and then they are looking at what kind of words and sentences appear close to each other and connect those sentences as similar. Like if the words "fruit" and "strawberries" appeared on one site that has strawberries as it's main focus and the words "fruit" and "bananas" appear on another site that has bananas as it's main focus, then it is a pretty safe bet that the sites are related since the word "fruit" appears on both sites. That is a very very very simplified way of looking at how it could be done. There are also a lot of ways to classify words and group them based and Google is probably using at least several of those ways.
Google does a couple of things to determine the relative relation of your backlinks. I'd look for two things specifically: First, are any of your keywords appearing in the text of the page where your link appears? The spiders are text-only readers, but they do read every word in the document, and having your keywords appear there will help out a lot. Second, Google can index and cross-reference synonyms using a dictionary not unlike the one Microsoft Office uses. So, if the site has a lot of keywords regarding something similar (i.e. "fitness" "exercise" etc.) it will understand that these are related to "muscle building." Basically, just look at the site and ask yourself if it is relevant to your own site. The Google Algo is smarter than you think and will put it together. Always remember, Google strives to think like a human looking for relevant material, so, think like a human. Hope that helps, good luck.
As was previously stated, the keywords you want to rank for should be on the page, in the title, in the URL, appear in outbound link URLs, etc. If a site ranks for your keywords, then it is a relevant place to get a link.
That is a good question as most people use the term "relevant link" without thinking about what "relevant" actually means. For example most people would be at a loss to find any relevancy for a link from a page describing "rubber vulcanization" to a page on "hydrogen fuel cells". However the link would be highly relevant to a searcher who was seeking information on Victorian inventions because both processes were discovered in 1839. So relevancy must always have a context and for search engines to determine relevancy they must use simple metrics as a proxy for context. The alternative would be to construct a database with an almost infinite number of "contexts". There are many metrics used to varying degrees but certainly the most important is a function of where the linking page ranks for the anchor text. In your case for example if you are trying to rank a page for building muscle then the most relevant links you can have are from high ranking pages for the search term building muscle. Hope that helps. - Michael
Yeah it is a great post. I don't know what others think, but i try to use a short relevant post about my niche when I do a blog post. eg; How my niche can relate to the topic of the blog. For example if I am posting on a depression forum or blog, i wil post how fitness and training can help with endorphins and balance the mood for depressed people. Of course I will prefer a forum or blog of health, but I think if you can relate your post to the subject and include your won subject matter and perhaps start a debate about your point of view then you will increase the density of the key words associated with your niche. If it is a good pr follow on blog you should do it. But you need to understand your niche and how it can relate to the topic.
google backbone is pure AI artificial intelligence that is my best guess if you can see ssomething is relevant count on it they can see it 9 times out of 10 automatically maybe even 99.9999 out of 100 who knows
nice answer for a 10 post member! I agree but not so much with number one seeing if that was the case social networking websites with link backs would be screwed. Seeing you will never have the same page content you will technically never have a relevant back link. Specifically the cross-reference synonyms part it makes a lot of sense! Overall I like you concept rep added!
Good point, maybe Google makes an exception for social networking sites kind of like it boosts wikipedia articles? Who knows. I do still think on-page text has to be relevant because many press release or article-style submissions often only give URLs without anchor text. In spite of this, they still seem to rank high as relevant links for the keywords immediately surrounding the address.
maybe we can assume they will look at the meta tags in the case of social networking sites! I know there doing something special because technically digg should have a really bad page rank! I think I have to agree with you 100%
They actually assign a group of keywords to identify a particular niche. So if yours have the set of keywords that matches with another one, most probably that's how they determine that both are relevant. That's what I presume.
I think that as google grows and becomes more knowledgeable it is nearing the point that it may be able to make it's own decision as to whats relevant or not to your topic. I think that things are far more complex that most could even fathom. With money like that who knows what they're up to.
But the fact is Google loves Digg. So we should agree that there are some exclusion for social networking sites otherwise as u said Digg shouldn't have good Page Rank.
This may be worthy of its own thread, I'd like to see what others think of Digg's high PR and why Wiki pages are ranked so high in SERPS. Doesn't making exceptions like this kind of diminish the "sanctity" of the Google algorithm? Or maybe I am putting it on a pedestal. Bring back meta tags!
Word. I may do a little research in the waning hours of my workday to see if I can get some insight on this. Can't be any less productive than trolling my new favorite forum.
I started a thread seeing I felt like I was hijacking haha! http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1085259