Relevance and Other Search Engine Ranking Factors
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This is the third part of a five-part series on search engine optimization factors. In this part, we will cover topical relevance of links to a site, a site's relevance to the search query, whether Google manually awards rank to some sites, and more. We will also take a look at some factors that can negatively affect your site's ranking in the search engine results pages (SERPs), and finish up with an in-depth look at different kinds of links.
Topical Relevance of Links to a Site
Does it matter if inbound links are topically related? If it doesn't I've wasted 14 years of my life. - Eric Ward
That’s a bold statement.
It’s not likely that Google can spot all links that are topically related, but it’s one of the most important factors in today’s SEO. The topic, however, does not have to be a 100% exact match. A link from a site about credit cards to one about mortgages is still in the same space.
Also analyzed are the page topic, headlines, and text surrounding the anchor text.
Site Relevancy to the Search Query
Some examples are counterproductive: Wikipedia and About.com, which rank for all terms and cover just about everything except porn.
Site relevancy is more important for smaller websites that have less link popularity, because relevancy, after all, is the goal of all search engines. This is especially true now since the defusing of Google Bombs.
The Google Bomb is a technique that ranked websites for terms irrelevant to the content. The best example of a Google bomb is former US president George Bush’s ranking for the keywords “miserable failure,” which led to his official biography located on whitehouse.gov. Google bombing is as simple as getting links from various websites with targeted anchor text. In the Bush example, links to his biography page had the anchor text “miserable failure.”
Google defused this by analyzing the relationship of the anchor text to the page being linked. If the two don’t match, the link is discounted.
Going back to the topic of site relevancy to the search query: page relevancy is key, while site relevancy is less important if there is link popularity making up for it. Examples are About.com and Wiki. On the other hand, a razor-focused niche website definitely gets extra kudos.
Manual Site Ranking
To reframe a subheading: “Does Google somehow manually award websites with good rankings?”
There’s a lot of speculation about this, but no real answers. Many quickly point to Wikipedia as proof, but we will never know for sure until someone comes clean from Google. My guess is that it makes sense to have this mechanism in place. Maybe Sergei, Larry and Eric have the switch… like a special briefcase to nuclear weapons that presidents carry.
Next: Negative Search Engine Optimization Factors >>
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