Is G shifting toward on page and site relevance?

Yes I know one swallow doesn't make summer or so, but two of our domain which we haven't touched for more than a year have suddenly started to shoot back up into top positions.
These have less BL's than sites around them but generic and good content and are loosely interlinked with sites of similar broad content (Insurance/Fianncials).

Personally I would welcome a more aggressive use of actual content and embedded content (or understanding of concept) as BL's just favor directories and "empty" shells of which there are too many in relative high positions.

Any thoughts?
Expat

 

I hope that happens, too much weight is placed on the links compared to the actual page content.

 

I think the serps don't bear that out. I've looked at the results for many of the k/w's I've been tracking and I find that there are a great deal many pages high up in the serps that have very poor on page relevance. I just think G is totally screwed up. The Feb 3rd update was a huge step backward IMHO.

 

I would agree with mopacfan on this. Whenever I am personally looking for things online, google has the worst returns. I almost always use yahoo or msn for meaningful results.

 

me too. G sucks lately

 

If they are leaning towards on-site, then they certainly need to weed out the portals. So do Y1 & MSN. Sometimes get higher rankings on spam portal or directory.

 

Just keep both on and off page items in order. Optimize but don't try to stuff or overdo links with all the same anchor text. Make it seem natural even if it isn't. Have site link to you in varying ways with a mix of anchor text and pages being linked to.

(if the links were all natural would they all be identical? )

 

I don't know what Google is up to, but we also have a site that has not been touched (mine in over 3 years) that is not #1 for some very competitive terms. I have no idea why. I have stopped trying to figure it out.

 

I've seen this suggested a few times recently, I could see them wanting to give on-page factors more value, but only after they can discount "traditional" on-page manipulation.

I thought the use of semantics might have given them that....

 

somehow, except homepage they have put 0 page rank to all my pages. And i have seen similar effect on few sites. While my sites work well in MSN

 

Could you explaint this some more?

 

If/when G can determine the topic of the page without relying on keywords it would make most on-page manipulation redundant, and with confidence in their "document relevancy score", could give it more weight as a ranking factor.

Just speculation... ;-)

 

as much as i agree i also think that the amount of times the phrases appear on the page is a bs way to determine if the quality is good. i hope it's more sophisticated than that.

 

I think on-page relevancy should be a combination of keyword occurrence and the occurrence of related vocabulary (ontology). This is where an analysis tool of how Google clusters certain terms would come in quite handy.