Līve Ambitions

We’ve all been told that building relevant backlinks are important to SEO. However, have you ever wondered how Google determines relevancy between 2 websites that do not share much keywords?

For Example:

Say you have site A linking to site B, but site A is about cars while site B talks about brake pads. And, say both sites don’t really mention too much about the topic of the other site. How would Google then determine that cars are relevant to brake pads? Unless you are human or a really complex program, it would be very difficult to figure out.

For one, we know that the Google search engine is not human, although it is programmed by humans. And two, we can pretty much rule out the idea that Google has a bunch of people sitting around analyzing keyword relationships all day. My hope is that Google is smarter than that. To me, Google is about intelligence, simplicity, automation and streamlining. This may only be my opinion, but keep in mind that Google is the search engine leader for a reason, and they’ve invested billions into research and refinement over the years.  I’ve tried searching for answers, but there isn’t much to read about on this topic.

So, Here’s My Theory:

The only answer left is in their algorithm. I don’t think it’s a single factor. I think it’s based on several different factors, such as:

• Bounce rate of any given anchor text or alt tag keyword.
• An automated system that learns and compares keyword relationships over time.
• For an already established website with tons of links, acquiring new backlinks will only re-enforce its authority and improve its rankings.

Update:  Here’s what Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz.org says about topical relevance:

Years ago, Google Labs featured an automatic classification tool that could predict, based on a URL, the category and sub-category for virtually any type of content (from medical to real estate, marketing, sports and dozens more). It’s possible that engines may use these automated topical-classification systems to identify “neighbourhoods” around particular topics and count links more or less based on the behaviour they see as accretive to their quality of ranking results.

I’ve not been able to verify anything regarding Google Labs and their automatic classification tool, but it seems plausible.  Also, I don’t think Google wants to make it any easier for link builders to do SEO.