Everyone assumes that google give more weight to related links, but how small or broad is the spectrum of what's considered related. An example. Lets say i have a site about blue pet badgers. What whould then be considered realted. Onle sites about Blue pet badgers, all sites about badgers, all pet related sites, all animal sites? What do you think?
In my mind they are all related some more closely than others. I have yet to see any discernable difference between theamed link and non-theamed link. Shannon
what matters is what google interprets...but wouldn't we assume they'd they'd follow something logical, like Smyrl describes. Why not just try to shoot as close as possible?
Not me! IMO a link's a link. And, the higher the PR, the better. IMO, It doesn't matter if the site you are linking from is "related" to yours site or not. Having said that, the better option still is to get links from related sites purely because you are in a better position to benefit from referred traffic as well, i.e: if a travel site gets a PR5 link from a site selling widgets, it probably won't get any quality traffic from the widgets site (only PR benefit).
How can we relate a link from a website about blue widgets done by a webmaster in India and then they are linking to each ? How is this link in the Search Engines Eyes. AFAIK, all links are good as long as they are one way.
One of my domains will be four months old in two days. It has 1,680 pages of quality content, all done manually. - don't use a CMS. Depending on which search engine or which tool you choose to believe it has over 22,000+ links. Of course Google only show a tiny fraction of those at 218 backlinks. Also my site is listed in TONS of directories including the Yahoo! Directory. Still waiting on DMOZ. But my site for some wierd reason doesn't show any "Related" links on the Google related command? Is this because my site is still in the Sandbox or what. Surely with all the content and backlinks my site has Google should be able to pick out 32 related sites. Even Google says that my site "flavor" is telecommunications/television, which is 100% correct as the site is about satellite tv and all the satellite tv sites are rated that way. What gives?
Apparently the big thing at Google is "clustering", which is really another way to talk about themes. I've heard mention that it's helpful to use the tilde query to get an idea of what the googlet considers related to your primary keyword. For instance if your keyword is "fashion" then related/similiar words might be: clothing, apparel, designer brand, style, accessories, etc. Think about what any words you might use if you were having a conversation about blue pet badgers. You'll definitely mention badgers, but you might also mention pets, pet supplies, vets, animals, etc. I still think you have to judge links individually...and keep the flow of building links natural. A link from a site with 'weight' or authority (even if it's not related) can help a lot. One thing I've noticed since December is that Google really loves older sites with minimal reciprocal link exchanges. I can get new websites a PR 4 or 5 with just a few links from my older sites (which are PR 5). All of my sites kicked a** on the latest update, except one. That one is the only site I've been doing heavy recips on. I never really do more than 5 reciprocal links a month on the others. I might have a whole whopping 20 sites i've exchange links with, AND I'm pretty close to being were I want to be on googlet. My theory these days is to focus on one way links, plus links from sites with a lot of weight (authority). You have to think quality over quantity, keep your content unique, and then be patient.
Dreamshop - Yeah, I'm pretty much like you, I have a ton of one way links. Many from directories, and I write articles and then submit them to article directories. I also have two blogs and I blog my heart out and have submitted both my satellite blogs to over 90 blog directories/RSS news feeds and on and on. I only have a certain amount of recirprocal links. Not that many really, just enough to give my site a good score in the local PageRank thingy..... To answer my own question, I believe that my site just isn't old enough yet at not quite 4 months old and I believe, like many do, that Google has instituted a 6 month delay on new links/sites..... So guess (as always) I'll just have to keep being patient awhile longer.....
I believe Google will rather look at the following onpage factors of the linkpage. Onpage positioning - Header, body, footer HTML positioning of link - Link in content, footer etc. Ammount of links out on page Reciprocal link back from page/URL linked to? Link weight. Link text and occurence of link text in page content.
The tilde search is a good tool to find out what Google thinks is related. Also, Google Sets from the labs can help you. The AdSense sandbox here on DP can be your 3d tool to work out what Google thinks a pgae is about. The 'related results' in a search is only about relatedness in terms of linking; not semantically or subject related.
I am using the terms suggestion tool from Google adwords, but this is obvious. What I want to say is this: putting more weights on links coming from related pages is one of the best Google options to fight spam. Thus, even if Google may not be able to use this feature today, it will definitively use it tomorrow. Forward planning, you should be getting links from related on topic pages, even if G. may not yet be able recognise them as related.
I think MSN will beat them to implementing it but I agree, you should optimize for the future, not for today. MSN is claiming already that it can interpret language better than anyone else. It shouldn't take long before they make these advanced linguistic features a major part of their algo.
If you want to know what is a related link ask the search engine your targetting! For example, if you want to target 'blue pet badgers' in Google, go to Google and search for 'blue pet badgers'. Depending on your search term there will be anywhere between thousands to millions of pages of 'related' links.
Mmmm, thinking about it Google has actually made it more difficult to use their search to find these words. I remember a couple of months ago when you used keyword -keyword you got a number of alternative keywords. So if you were looking for alternatives for search term shoes you would type "shoes -shoes" and got some interesting results. Now you get ZIP!