Someone brought it to my attention yesterday that the related:domain.com query in google pulls up some sites that are not related to my site at all. I have a craft (ish) site (the pet memorials sig is the site in question, but the main domain not the internal page in the sig) and my related results are showing Viagra and Gambling sites. I can't see one site that I actually know and have any sort of relationship with. My rankings have been bad for this site since Bourbon update and don't seem to be improving very much - is this the reason why? How could my site have got associated with such sites? Should I write to google and tell them?
This usually means you are participating in a recip network like linkmarket.net (or something similar) Related has everything to do with linking.
I'm not. I signed up to one recip link thingy but never added one of the links I was offered as they were all crap. That was over a year ago and I removed my myself from their list. Is this something someone else could have maliciously signed my site up for?
I offered an answer for this a few days ago. Read this please : http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=28998
Thanks for posting that expertu, but it doesn't really explain my situation. If I look at an internal page with the relation: tool I see sites that I recognise and if I don't recognise them I see that they are on topic. Related, if you like. But for the homepage I get rubbish.
Except a third party can link to you and cause the association. So there need not be a direct link in order to be viewed as related.
I've had unrelated sites in my listings since that search was available. I have never had issues because of it. Its a by product of any decent SEO campaign.
I have marked as bold the important text. The index gets unrelated websites, because others may link to you. Usually you have no control over this, ut if you really want, you could e-mail those website owners, and tell them to remove their link to you.
And site W could be linking to site X heavily and then Site W will show up in related due to one link from X (Even thought they aren't linking directly) You may not like Site W but you can hardly ask them not to link to X
It's true. YOu don;t have control over another website's content. But you can try to ask the owner to do this. I had these problems before. Some websites with millions of SPAM pages(which took content from google, and stored it in a db, for every search made in their site, than made a page for that) linked to me and i was related to them, in the related parameter. I actually had to get up to the host to ask the owner (because the owner did not respond to my emails/telehpones) to remove my link from his website. In two months after he removed that link, he was banned from google I avoided a mess. Such incidents happen. All we can do (those of us who desire quality content) is monitor our websites, and try to do the best we can to preserve them in the condition we want. Am i wrong here ?