Raw Popularity Trumps Relevence?

after performing a search of "p*ker" (w/o quotes and asterik), the number 11 or 12 result for us shows up as victoriassecret.com. what are some of the reasons on why the SERPs have deemed this relevent to the usually gambling related keyword?

granted, i'm aware that this particular site has something to do with the word p*ker, but it's in an entirely different context.

there is a stip poker game created by them . I think , if they already have massive link popularity a fews links with the text poker in them would do a lot

I played that, and it is SOOOOO USA (as in: opposed to dutch). I wonder why they ever got the BL boost. Heck, my granny is sexier than that when she puts her dentures in a glass of water at nights.

That said, they did well, kudos to them

One thing we have noticed on some of our sites is that if the site is considered to be a 'strong' site then as long as you add in some content and a few links you can pretty quickly get into the SERPs. We have been able to take sites and add some very tenuously related content and move this onto the first page of the serps in about 2-3 weeks. usually these sites are PR 6 plus and average age is 4-5 years.

VS probably didn't trip any spam filters and I'm sure GG's preference for temporal link data (they've recently gotten very popular) has helped quite a bit.

so VS is all about this card game then, right? :-?

when a top site can rank for any keyword they want (and highly at that), regardless of true relevency there has to be a reason why. i know they've cropped up recently due to an influx but visit the site (i know i have) and find anything else about the subject. you won't, but be my guest to keep looking.

would this have anything to do with the concept of trusted sites (based on popularity)? such as, when VS or a Yahoo! service or -fill in major site name- gains an enormous amount of BLs in a very short period of time it's ok...they're on the trusted list ?

I think "trusted site" is much closer to the truth ...

My site started moving up through the SERPs after renewing my domain for the second year.

According to Google Directory, my site is #1 in page rank order for my industry. Yet I usually land #3-5 in search results. The sites that usually beat me have been around for 7-9 years.

I guess G trusts them more .... :-(

Relevant content can only go so far. Like you said, age and back links is the marker for high SERP’s.

D

I beginning to notice that as well. I was able to achieve high SERPs for pretty competitive keywords/phrases I have never optimized for. There must be some "trust site" factor involved. Or maybe its just because of diversity in anchor of "natural" BLs your site gets. Different people use different phrases to link to you but they all are about one theme. Maybe G stores all words used in all anchors and then ranks your site based on that collective. I don't think I would be able to rank good for p0k3r though, maybe news sites have additional advantages and could.

I've been a proponent of the trust factor theory for quite some time now.

We know that each page has a doc score as it relates to a specific keyword or phrase. I believe that G multiples the doc score by a trust factor of 0 - 1.

So if the raw doc score is 20,000 and the trust factor is .5 the final doc score is 10,000. That could mean the difference between ranking #1 or #201.

In my view, it just makes sense to think in terms of trust. Look at this very board. Just because someone has 2000 posts doesn't mean his/her opinion is valuable. But, take someone with 1000 posts and a reputation of 4 and chances are they know what they're talking about. Basically, that member is more trusted.

If this is true, we all would be wise in asking ourselves if the things we are doing will increase, or decrease G's trust in our sites.

/*tom*/

I have a site that I can test this on, it should be interesting. it ranks top 10 for competitive terms and it only has like 10 backlinks if that. Figures I bust my but and the site with no effort ranks great.