Florida (and all the future updates) uncovered pt II by 2K

This thing blew my mind, when Maneesh send me a PM asking "how is the 'related: ' search related to theming?". When starting to type a reply everything just clicked and I knew what was and is wrong with google SERPS and SEO/SEM-strategies.

Here's a direct quote-reply from the original post I never send to maneesh (hope you don't mind me making this BIG a post)




This is visual image of how google themes your site.
It's not exact image, more like a glimpse of various aspects google has on onpage-pagetheme. Most likely there's also some filtering based on algo, so the visible SERPS show only partial truth.

In an optimised situation, you see only pages that are very accurate to your keyword/keytheme. But because of Internets multilinking nature (anyone can link to anything), there will always be a small proportion of pages not directly themed to your site but yet showing in relation to your site.

As far as I can tell, the data is gathered from several sources. The most obious one comes from DMOZ/google directory. This has always been, and most likely will be a major factor in Googles themed SERPS. If themes are true, then it's pretty obious DMOZ PR is not as significant as the theme it gives you.

The second major source of theme is pages linking to you. I think this needs no further explanations.

The third major source of page theme is your outgoing links. I think this will play a major role if page is in a wrong theme and a webmaster/seo wants to correct it situation (I'm going to test this the coming weekend)

Fourth source is Google dictionary (or maybe was, cause I'm not seeing at the moment). Most likely a part of related: results is gathered from SERPS having a very closely related keywords to your site's top keywords

How this all affects to traditional SEO-strategy is in my opinion a major issue. All traditional guidebooks saying "get all the links you can" and "don't link outside" are actually worsening the situation because they distort themes.

Theme's are much like building blocks: when one site distorts, the others near it suffer too. One distortion in your related doesn't bother, but when there's tens or hundreds of them your building collapses and damages the others near you too.

Update Florida was most likely the first update to introduce a new themed algo. Since then we've had new updates, both causing the similar pain and chaos. The blockword/moneyword lists were (and are) actually caused by SEO's wrong actions and as long as we continue building wrongly themed sites we suffer.

So far this has affected mainly on english pages, but most likely it will spread step-by-step, language by language to be a worldwide rule. English is the language most googlers use, after that french, spain, portuquese, germany etc. most likely to follow.

Most likely this is pretty heavy thinking, but I'd like to hear everyones opinions too.

-keijo-

Interesting concept. I'll see how I can free up some time and try testing it. Will probably take a few months to see some serious results, but I think it might just be worth it.

2K,

I agree strongly that links to related content on your internal pages is extremely important. Also important is that your internal pages have a lot of text related to your topic. This simply proves that your site is about what your anchor text says it is.

I'm wondering though why we would believe that theming in backlinks from other sites would make sense. The most competitive serps are the ones seo's go after because they are profitable. You would think naturally that competitor sites would not link out to each other. The only sites that link out to each other for a competitive phrase such as "mortgages" are all seo's! Everyone who has more organic top rankings has links across a broad spectrum of related and unrelated sites.
Along this reasoning, too many links from related sites could be bad.

Good concept and quite possible but



Would clearly give a website power to influence another's rank and this is as bad as bombing a competitor. Google will never ever give a webmaster/SEO the power to affect anyone but themselves. If you get penalised or banned it's because of something you did not others. I dont think Google would let SEOs decide what is related and what isn't. Too much freedom.

Nice to see some opinions. I just can't wait to put a small test on my theory ;)

Here's a quick reply to most important stuff...




In short: Building a themed page from bottom to up is the thing...





True. It's only another type of distortion and totally matchable to what I'm saying ("In an optimised situation, you see only pages that are very accurate to your keyword/keytheme. But because of Internets multilinking nature (anyone can link to anything), there will always be a small proportion of pages not directly themed to your site but yet showing in relation to your site."). I believe that google engineers have taken this into account and created an system that needs to "breathe" like human: too much oxygen blows you, too little suffocates you.

As for mortages as an exampe... What happens to a house if you build it totally of one type of material, eg. tiles or glass? It's pretty unstable and uncomfortable to live. The mortage-theme and themes surrounding it must be so *stuffed* with crosslinking/closely linked themes that most of the sites blow themselves out never realising what hit them. Theme's are a bidirectional thing like PR: give some, get some. But what you always need to grow is new blood.






Isn't it? At least that's what I've been doing all my life. Writing content that is relevant to something.

As for bombing, there are two obstacles: page rank and theme bi-directionality.

Page rank: Every incoming link gives a vote for page and thus strenghens the theme and value of actual onpage content.

bi-directionality: linking to another page creates a connection between pages themes. If your theme distorts, the same goes for site linking to you.

If you make 100 links from florists site to hosting site, you add a connection between these two - eventually the florist site can be found when looking for hosting and vice versa. You can't expect top serps, but you're there ( I know this as a fact, cause I've experimented it). If you make 100 differently themed sites pointing to hosting site, you only make minor flux to main theme. And in both cases, you give out PR that enhances the value of onsite theme. So in case of bombarding, you most likely end up giving a boost to your competitor.

True. I have experienced that too. Though I don't have 100s of sites, but if the interlinking of sites and the on-page content; the text around the links in particular I'd say, do send a strong clue to Google regarding the possible theme of a site, then you can have even a hosting related site ranking atop the serps for yellow pages related search phrase. I have seen that, and if someone remebers there was a long thread regarding the same here on seo chat.

A good hypothesis overall, since it explains quite a few things, to me at least. Worth experimenting with, I'd say. Thanks for sharing, 2K.

If you make 100 links from florists site to hosting site, you add a connection between these two - eventually the florist site can be found when looking for hosting and vice versa. You can't expect top serps, but you're there

********** i think this is just a result of the on page content to put the links there ... i think if you just wrote that content on the page you might get in the serps without any links being there ... so i dont see the "connection" as the thing necessairly getting you there .... but i do not know that, just an opinion ...

I do KNOW, I have seen many ... and happen to have a site myself that ranks VERY high on multi million page competitive keywords without any outlinking to other sites AT ALL ... and also no backlinks except from very closely related subject content pages at third party sites ....

FYI ... i reviewed some of the "similar pages" data for a few sites i know well and here is the pattern i saw ....
1) the pages in that site most linked to from the outside ... and from the inside (ie high pr pages)
2) the outside sites most linked to from the site
3) a site or 2 .... which is NEITHER linked to or from ... which is in the same subject category ...


BTW ... i did notice something curious in this process ... maybe you can make some sense of ... we use some gif images ... for tracking ( we issue cookies in the page body via an image) .... and g showed those images in that "similar data" ... like "xxx.gif" ... since thay can not analize an image to place it into any theme at all ... why would they list that there if it is a theme issue??? maybe it is just because it is a popular item (like the category 1 items above)>>??

Actually the onpage content and text around links doesn't seem to be that important as many do seem think. They do count, but if they are not available google must follow linktext.

Theme's are one of the things we are testing with out crosslinking experiment (4 different sites doing different types crosslinking) and it has brought a lot surprising results.

One of the tests is a distorted theme where we created a linkrelation between:

our company site <-> our education site <-> a commercial mobile ringtone searchengine we own.

The results for ringtone site are somewhat interesting. There are the regular relations to:

* our mainsite of course
* websites using our products (they link back to us)
* Sites that are in the same Google directory cat as our main site (programming and education)
* Sites similar to our webisite (not in dmoz, but having same incoming link sources)
* Sites that are found in related: search to sites similar to ours (here are very interesting sites that put a minor distortion)
* Google and google directory


and the missing thing... there are no relations to any mobile sites whatsoever....


The page has a enough PR to get it good SERPS and good keyword rich content/backlinks but it's nowhere to be seen (mostly somewhere around #150-180, the best result is #15). What I'm trying to experiment is what happens when we start adjusting the sites theme back to it's place? First step is adding outgoing links to other mobile sites and wait for an update, then we get links from other closely related sources and wait for an update. Etc.




True. Links are only a part of theme building, and themes are only part of the entity that we now as SERPS. In a themed world, quality is the word instead of quantity. But a lot backlinks is good too (most likely there is a point, where you can hit the theme with pure link popularity, but I'm afraid this limit is too high for most situatons; maybe 2-3 PR steps)




you hit the nail. Google is only stypid code trying to act smart. It cannot make a difference between image of product and a image used as a tracking tool. Most likely it thinks the image as "your themed product".

Theme's are not the la-la-wonderland, and there's no simple solution for everyone. If you success in theming, you are limited to a certain area of keywords. But you get good SERPS if you have the entity in place. If you don't success in theming, you still have a good change in being atop. Most of the web is more or less unthemed (or pages have a low "themevalue"). Getting topserps with old-fashioned PR-hammering strategy is possible and in some situations it's the only way.

Just wanted to say that I really liked your post/article. I think is one of the most interesting things I read lately.

So, to know if a site has the best theme built possible you would just search for related sites and there shouldn't appear sites linked to it (with unrelated topic) but sites really related, right?

If you have 50% links, 50% related then you should work more in theme building, right?

I'll research about it and let everyone know if I find out something.

Julian Yanover.

Maybe I found something....

If you search for related sites to Google (I thought this would be the perfect themed site) you see that it shows 75% related and 25% sites that linked to it.

If you consider that Google has thousands of inbound links, then it's excelent the way they themed their site, showing lots of other search engines.

So, I'm enjoying 2k's theory more every minute!

edited a few minutes later: One more thing. Everyone remembers that Google gets beated by Altavista for "search engine", right? Guess what, if you look in related sites for Altavista 100% are related sites so Altavista has a best themed site. I think that's the reason Altavista is #1 for that search.

GREAT DISCOVERY 2K!!!

Julian Yanover.

Thanks to everyone for this very interesting thread. It has always puzzled me that one of my sites is cleary in a different "theming" with a 'related:' search. Based on this thread I finally made some research, and here are my findings:

The sites' (PR4) intended theming: Cigars. 250+ pages all with cigar related content.

G's 'related:' search results: 30+ sites, 2 sites are cigar related, all the others are wine related ones.

The word wine appears as a single word in body text on 3 lower-level pages in my site. Clearly, it is not the sites' theme.

Outgoing links: 50+ all to cigar related sites, except for 2 links, one to the Y portal's cigar listings and one to G because I use their onsite search function. Not one outgoing link to a wine site.

Incoming links: 100+, mostly from the personal home page of cigar smokers (PR 0 -2). A few links from pure cigar sites (PR 1 - 4)

And here, I think, I found the reason: 1 link from a PR 6 authority wine page. It is my sites' highest PR page incoming link. There are no PR 5 links presently.

This one link apparently is able to theme my site totally away from its original theme.

Granted, my sites' metrics are probably too small to make much out of it. But then, what happens on this small scale might well apply to a larger one, too.

Hamaki, your example proves why Google recently recommended to create larger sites.
It's easier for them to recognize the site's theme/s.

It also shows how a link can mess your site's theme.

Isn't there a possibility that themes is the answer behind this new results instead of Hilltop or TSPR???

The more I research it, the more I believe it.

Julian Yanover.

Thanks. It's always nice to hear someone apreciating your thoughts/research.




Not quite... As said earlier, themes need a small bit of diversity. What google related: shows is only part of the truth. It's bit like link:search - only the most important data is returned. In reality, there could be hundreds/thousands of minor themes going on.




Depends on how the 50% related are related in their own entity. Theming is bidirectional, where everything affects practicly on everything (which makes it even harder to fool than PageRank).



how true, how true...




To my beliefs, wines and cigarettes already have strong connection. The link only enhances the connection more.




only google (and maybe googleguy) know this for sure... This is just my theory...