"themed" links- how themed is themed?

there's been a lot of talk about themed links in general, but this is something I still have trouble digesting:

how closely related to they have to be for google to recognize them?

it makes sense that google could say, look at your site, decide it's about "widgets" and then if a site linking to you has widgets-content, their incoming links would be more valueable..

but since some people don't want to link to direct competitors, they might try to link with something similar that isn't directly related. perhaps an off-brand "widget" spinoff- is this still more of a topical/themed link? how could it be? how could google recognize that?

if directory structure makes more sense with a real word example...

our site would fall roughly like this "computer/video games -> roleplaying games -> final fantasy"

if we had roleplaying game sites- with little or no mention of final fantasy directly- would google value that link more than say, a link from a site about lawnmowers?

 

I don't believe that any SE is giving any more importance or weight to a themed link…in part because of the question you're asking….how could you accurately determine "theme" across millions and millions of sites?

 

It might be possible to generate "themes" purely mathematically by ignoring all page content and only looking at cross-linking.

Imagine a visual map of the Internet where each web site is a dot and each link between web sites is a line. Sites with lots of lines between them would be "themed". Some "themes" would encompass hundreds of web sites.

Sites with more links to each other would be heavily themed. Sites with fewer links to each other would be lightly themed. You could define thresholds for how many inks were required to qualify a site (or even a page) as "themed."

I personally have never seen even a single piece of real-world evidence which supports the theory that any search engine is using "themes".

 

The first question, and the one all the others have asked, is, what makes you think that Google is looking at anything other than anchor text?

But assuming they are looking at more, it is called themes, not exact word match. I don't know why everyone gets so damn anal about everything that Google might or might not do.

Probably the best guess at how they would judge theme match is given by how they display AdSense on a page. With AdSense that are judging the theme of a page and then placing the relevant links. So you could work backwards from here and figure out if they would think that your link was themeatically related.

Shawn has a tool called the AdSense sandbox. You can submit a page to it and the tool will display what AdSense ads Google would display for that page. So if you want to kmnow if a page that is going to link to you might be thematically related use Shawns tools. If the AdSense ads are for your type of page, or pages of your competitors then you know that it is thematically relevant.

Now even AdSense doesn't work all the time. I read somewhere recently about a guy who has a vegetarian web site. On his site he talks about the evil of meat and also about the value of organically grown vegetables. Google ran an AdSense ad on his page for Organic Buffalo Meat. So theme matching is still and inexact science and I doubt that Google has implemented it for judging the relevance value of backlinks yet.

 

Look to the search results Google serves.

If you are targeting 'final fantasy games' - a link from any site in the first 1000 (for example) results for that search would be more relevant than any other link.

Look at 'local rank' Google has a patent on it, which basically says they generate the results, then scan the results for links between them, then re-serve the results based on interconnectedness.

It is a fairly common sense way of giving a boost to 'authority' sites.

For example: If a real estate site gets 500 links from non-local sites it would not do as well as a competing site which gets 500 links from local sites (local as in, from the same set of search results)[other factors being equal].

Most of the time though the power of anchor text is more influential in search results. I would take 500 non-local links with the correct anchor text over 500 local links with the wrong anchor text any day.

The reason why a themed pages is better is it should turn up in the results as the target page (making it a local link). There is some question of how far into the search results local rank is calculated. Is local rank only determined by the interconnectedness of the to 1000 results or top 5% of results - we don't know, we don't actually know if local rank is in use by Google.

So to come closer to your question - I would say the biggest determining element that themes a page is the anchor text pointing to it.

[i hope that made sense to someone - i'm not feeling very descriptive today]

 

So the importance would lie in a themed page, not necessarily a themed site?

Meaning that if a news site had an article about Final Fantasy, a link from that one page (even though it was from a news site), could be just as 'themed' as a link from a video game site?

I've been wondering this a lot lately, because I've thought about starting a project based on this concept.