"Relevancy": Can google really determine relevancy?

[wallofiron]

I just dont think its possible.

What is your feeling on relevant backlinks vs. non-relevant backlinks? Have you found that it mattered in your SERPs?

I can't see how "G" can determine the extent of relevancy. Sure if you leave a comment on a "model airplane" website about your "model airplane blog/store/affiliate site".... thats easy.

But any further than that I cant see how then can determine what is relevant. If you have a link to your "Glue" store page on a "model boat" website is that relevant? What if you dont sell model glue? Some models use glue some dont.. is that relevant?

You can extrapolate that how you want in any niche.


Thoughts?

 

[madoctopus]

Yes it can detect relevancy. There are different degrees of relevancy:

• Entire source site is relevant to your site
• The post is relevant to your site
• The link anchor is relevant to your site

It is not bulletproof but works ok

 

[GreyWolf]

Back in the 1970s, programmers were able to write code that could check an article for spelling errors. Then they were able to make programs that could check punctuation and style inconsistencies. Within a few years they were able to analyze the style of writing. By the 1980s when personal computers hit the scene they had full blown grammar checkers that could not only check for errors but offer suggestions to improve the writing.

Grammar checkers need to take into account the differences between nouns, verbs, adjectives and analyze their use not only within a sentence but throughout an article. That was all done on computers with less computing power than a modern calculator. The program could be stored on a 360K floppy disk and run on computer with an Intel 8088 processor and 256K RAM.

Checking for relevance in an article is just an extension of the same concept as grammar checkers. Just as grammar checkers improved over time, you can expect the same thing to happen with relevancy checks. With the computing power available to Google, I would think them more than capable of including relevancy checks within their system.

 

[bshearer]

Absolutely! It goes along with the Duplicate Content Penalty1

 

[Daniel0cean]

yahoo does it better nowadays when it comes to relevancy

 

[dannyhw]

It matters a whole lot. Blackhat in general is increasingly about stacking all of the other metrics in your favor when you just aren't going to get or aren't qualified to receive actual relevant links.

You have to think of it in more than terms of page content though. The best indicator of if a page is relevant to a keyword is its ranking. In any niche where there's decent competition, a link from a page that ranks in the top 10 for your target keywords is worth more than anything else, whether it's on a PR0 or a PR8. If you're doing WH link building you have to spend most of your time going for these because one or two added into your profile can land you on #1 easily.

For the purposes of massive link building, it's my opinion that it's not worth it to, say, limit your blog commenting to only blogs that come up in searches on your kw list + whatever footprint. They've got such little ACTUAL relevance that you may as well just use a bigger list of seemingly irrelevant posts that might be stronger in other metrics.

 

[compton13]

Well google does give me results that are relevant to whatever term I am searching for, so I think they have that relevancy thing figured out.

 

[dannyhw]

They have it figured out very well, but they've still got quite a ways to go! What you've got to do in this business is figure out what they'd like to do to be more relevant but just haven't figured out yet. Been doing that since day 1.

 

[GreyWolf]

Well google does give me results that are relevant to whatever term I am searching for, so I think they have that relevancy thing figured out.

Well, compton13 hammers in the point. That pretty much hit the nail right on its head. LOL

 

[wallofiron]

I would tend to think however that defining "relevancy" is like defining the term "obscene". What is obscene to one person may be completely acceptable and normal for another. I tend to think of programming relevancy the same way.

 

[Micallef]

There is no doubt that Google can determine relevancy.

However, the amount of relevancy required for a good link & the exact impact on SERPs of course remains unverified.

According to all theories, relevant links are best.

However, non-relevant links can still provide a big boost, and I have personally verified this.

This opens up questions about Google's tactics. We are sure that they have the capability to determine relevance levels to a high degree of sophistication. Why then do they still permit non-relevant links to induce higher rankings?

I suspect that in general, normal (non-spam) websites also have a healthy proportion of non-relevant links, which is why the ability to detect relevance is not the golden answer for Google. Clearly, they have to take a lot more into consideration.

 

[takeachance]

There is no doubt that Google can determine relevancy.

However, the amount of relevancy required for a good link & the exact impact on SERPs of course remains unverified.

According to all theories, relevant links are best.

However, non-relevant links can still provide a big boost, and I have personally verified this.

This opens up questions about Google's tactics. We are sure that they have the capability to determine relevance levels to a high degree of sophistication. Why then do they still permit non-relevant links to induce higher rankings?

I suspect that in general, normal (non-spam) websites also have a healthy proportion of non-relevant links, wh ich is why the ability to detect relevance is not the golden answer for Google. Clearly, they have to take a lot more into consideration.

An excellent reply as always from Micallef - to add to this. There is no doubt in my mind that G has cracked relevancy in terms of its results and indeed linking. You only have to look at the "~" symbol and its use in a search, you can see that for the most part G can understand the term input and can easily return relevant and associated results. It therefore stands to reason that inbound links to sites can also be assesed using a similar technology. That is not to say that unrelated links do not hold any power, quite the contrary in fact. I have experienced on a daily basis impacts in the serps from using high PR DF links from non relevant sites which indicates that it is in fact the power of the root domain combined with the page power which counts. High PR DF relevant links are (taking into account the above) however the elixir when it comes to the ultimate in serp increases although high power non relevancy incoming links are equally well received by my sites!

 

[ivictus]

I agree relevancy is attempted to be determined by G and definitely effects SERPS. Just the same as on page SEO determines relevancy. There is the ~ as mentioned above and other more subtle factors that do not show up easily.

 

[albaniax]

Go look for high competition keywords and see who is ranking. Seriously, go check their backlinks.

You will almost every time see backlinks from high PR sites from relevant sites!

But I can also second, that PR 5-6 backlinks do a lot, too. Now combine 1 + 1. Spread your links, get here a some, there some, and you hit top spots.

High PR backlinks are easy to find.
High PR + relevancy links you can either buy, or trade with others ( no reciprocal )

 

[MagicMike]

The whole "link relevancy" thing never made complete sense to me for a couple of reasons.

1. I have had very good results building links with absolutely non-relevant links (unless by accident).

2. A truly "popular" website will have links built to it from a wide variety of sources. People from all walks of life and interest will be linking back to it which will create an enormous amount of "irrelevant" links... yet they go viral.

I certainly understand the concept... and on the surface it appears to carry weight... but I just haven't seen the impact... at least not enough impact to make me stand up and change my game plan yet.

 

[roughy]

Is it possible to define relevance when it concerns a site with a very broad range of topics? I think it is not very easy to be defined. In such cases a link could be simultaneously relevant to a part of the site's content and irrelevant to another part.
So, I suppose the relevance has some significance but it is not so crucially important at the end. A link from a well-respected site although considered irrelevant to the content, could be still quite valuable if you think of it as "relevant" in terms of respectability.

I mean, if you think of the standard relevancy in the following way "Site A is a good site about cars. There is a link from site A to site B. Site B is about cars. Then site B is also a good site about cars." and now if you remove "about cars" from the above 4 sentences, you will get as a result that site B is a good site (without any content relation between sites A and B). But this still could be considered some kind of relevancy.

So, in my opinion, the relevance of the links matters primarily when they come from a less-respected sites and in the case when links from more authoritative sites are concerned the relevance is not so important.

 

[Jimmy2]

I think Big G can understand relevancy very well but non relevancy backlink also has their powers.

 

[Bunnyfu]

It's all math my friend. Just do a quick search on hidden topic markov models. Google uses them.

 

[sonamondal]

Is it possible to define relevance when it concerns a site with a very broad range of topics? I think it is not very easy to be defined. In such cases a link could be simultaneously relevant to a part of the site's content and irrelevant to another part.
So, I suppose the relevance has some significance but it is not so crucially important at the end. A link from a well-respected site although considered irrelevant to the content, could be still quite valuable if you think of it as "relevant" in terms of respectability.

I mean, if you think of the standard relevancy in the following way "Site A is a good site about cars. There is a link from site A to site B. Site B is about cars. Then site B is also a good site about cars." and now if you remove "about cars" from the above 4 sentences, you will get as a result that site B is a good site (without any content relation between sites A and B). But this still could be considered some kind of relevancy.

So, in my opinion, the relevance of the links matters primarily when they come from a less-respected sites and in the case when links from more authoritative sites are concerned the relevance is not so important.

can u plz elaborate, what do u mean by "authoritative sites"

 

[pirondi]

When you use the Google keyword tool you can see that google has the knowledge to sort keywords by relevancy.