Quoting directly from search-this.com Where can I find a list of themes that google recognizes which I can refer to when doing link exchanges. TIA
The DMOZ directory hierarchy is a good place to start. Electronics > radios, tvs, computers... Radios > Ham, FM, CB, AM That kind of thing. You will begin to recognize a site's overall theme and if it relates to yours by visiting it and browsing the pages. They don't have to offer the same thing - ipods, for example. Perhaps they sell earbud headphones? Related.
could having too many inbound links to a site that doesn't relate hurt your rankings for unrelated keywords? or does it not have a negative effect, just not a positive one?
The latter. If inbound links hurt you, you could easly take down your competion with thousands of unrelated links to their site.
A related question to ask is do links from * directories * forum signatures * ... matter... as much. If google can figure out that all your inbound links are from PR6 directories do you still get a PR6 that is of any value - since your linking from "themes" that are all directories
Like much of SEO, this is all guesswork or witchcraft depending how you looking at it. A number of people have pointed that links from forums and directories are not valued as much - probably because of the volume of the outgoing links rather than the theme ? Also take digitalpoint.com's theme - Does google classify it Shawns primary products or the SEO tools and forums that we all like. Back to my original question - what in google tells us it finds themes in websites ?
I've never seen a link to my site I didn't like. How much forum links count is up for debate. Many (like me) believe that they carry less weight than a good directory link or a themed PR 4-5 link... again, it can't hurt. Regarding directory links, I think some of it has to do with how many out bound links are on the page. A PR6 with 20 OBL's is stronger than the same page with 100 OBL's. I may not matter as much if that directory is an authority site like DMOZ
There is also the question of what effect PR actually has on SERP. My lingerie blog has a PR5 but is on the first or second page of virtually all of my keywords. One reason is that many of the other lingerie sites were put up four years ago and changed a couple of times since whereas mine is updated everyday. My own sense is that freshness counts for way more than PR when it comes to SERP.
There is a thread on cache date - McDar discovered and tabulated the results you may want to check it out.
Agreed with everything you said. In addition to the above quote. Apparently there is some documentation to show this...please refer to my very first post, the idea when applied to the example you described The 20 OBL's from a PR6 may get ranked lower than 20 OBL's from a PR4 If you use McDars tool it shows you this... because PR is not as important a factor as some other seo items to move you up the SERPs. One of factors that "may be" more important than PR is getting more inbound links from similar themed sites. This is why I want to know, "which group of keywords decribe a theme"... could it be the keywords from keyword stemming ?
interesting reading about the page cache, I think google has gone mad with power... like that albert shwitzer guy. Oh and wrkalot, would you consider a backlink with the anchor text "worst website ever" good? Any publicity good publicity?
There was a method of determining your web site theme from Google: labs. google. com/ personalized/ siteflavored But it seems to be dead. The flavors were very broad like "real estate" or "computers."
I wouldn't say way more, but it certainly is important and explains why blogs and forums do so well in SERPs...
Netizen , Thank you , siteflavored is exactly the lead I was looking for. Like you said all the links are currently dead and the trail has gone cold. Any new leads I can follow up and work out a number of themes
If I had the worst website ever I wouldn't like it, but since I don't... I'll take the link! Even better if you can throw my KW in there. I am a believer in themed links but wouldn't refuse a link from a non-themed site. I did a six month test a while back with 2 sites. Site 1 acquired only well themed links. Site 2, all types of links (themed and non-themed). After 6 months site 2 performed slightly better in the SERP's than site 1. Now there could be a thousand different reasons for that but I do think it proved (to me anyway) that theming is/was not as heavily weighted as some thought. ALL links were from PR0-5 and none were authorities. (I should have done a 3rd site with all non-themed links) Like you said in an earlier post... SEO is a lot of guess work. It seems like the rules change daily.
I like reading about SEO experiments people run on their sites, does anybody know some good threads about interesting seo experiments people have tried out?
SEO Chat has a lot of threads on user experiments. The problem is that they take so darn long to complete many never come back to post the results OR they never complete their tests because they get bored with it... heh. There was an interesting one about a year ago on the importance (or lack of importance) of bold, italic, under line etc.
From my observation of internet.commerce, as well as other sites that sell static text links - phpbb, weatherunderground etc selling off topic links....its a tricky question.