Sorry to post such a controversial thread ( this one, and the PR one, too ); I just want to know if some of the conclusions I'm starting to reach are on the right track. So I'm hoping people can give me some feedback on this one.

Everybody says the links pointing at your site, and that you make pointing out, should or must be relevant. I basically agree with this, but to a lesser degree. I think there's a danger of painting yourself into too small a niche looking for things that are directly related to your site. It seems like the SEs are trying to categorize the web ( probably "personal search" needs this ), and nobody wants to offend GoogleBot. So we pick a category to fit our site into, it's either about blogging, or or it's a webmaster resource, or something else.

My site is about photography, mainly landscape, but not exclusively. I've been working on a travel section, because shooting beautiful scenery means getting yourself to it. There will be articles about different roads, hiking trails, stuff like that, and links to places like the national park and national forest services, sites that have advice about picking a tent or a backpack, AAA, and more.

This is all stuff a human can recognize as being related to landscape photography, but a spider probably can't. On the other hand, it will benefit some of my readers ( other photogs ), and I think that's more important than the message this will probably send to the bots, which will probably be confusing.

I believe relevant and authority links serve two seperate (equally important) purposes.

Relevant links mean that you have links pointing to your site from sites which have visitors interested in seeing your content. People on a car site are interested in cars, So if they see a link to another car site they are liable to click it.

Authority links are more important for SEO than related links. If google finds a link to your site on an authoritive site, Regardless of the theme, They will think "well if this site is linking to it it must be pretty good", Even though it's content is completely unrelated to yours.

http://www.webmaster-talk.com/the-go...tml#post233085

how about this for controversy. optimizing your site for keywords isn't that important. honestly, your site content should naturally optimize for keywords.

I think this is a SEO indsustry ploy. They can help optimize your website, because it is easy and they can charge you fro it. the more important thing is making your site a important source which these guys can't do for you.

You might find this posting usefull: http://blog.promotionseo.com/?p=8 This will explain how relevance effect SEO.

I agree with Forrest, I rank in several terms with sites that I got complete opposite links with. It makes a difference sure, but not much IMO.

I wonder how search engines determine if the page is relevant or not?

Well, the anchor text of the link tells them that its about this subject before they even visit your site correct?

Hi Forrest, I'd posted this over at IHY about a week or so ago (Adam read it and said I broke his brain @ LOL) Anyway, I'd been seeing lots of referrals in my logs (for my directory) from http://i.stanford.edu/

So, I checked it out and had a look around. I found some very interesting projects:

Some of the focus areas are:

• Combating Spam in Tagging Systems
• Web Content Categorization Using Link Information
• Link Spam Detection Based on Mass Estimation
• Link Spam Alliances
• Web Spam Taxonomy
• Combating Web Spam with TrustRank

http://infolab.stanford.edu/~zoltan/publications.html

You can read the abstracts for the projects which is just a basic summary. The pdf files are also available and cover the project in-depth.

Of those projects, I found these two to be the most interesting ones:

• Web Content Categorization Using Link Information
• Link Spam Alliances

Thanks for the fascinating links, Deb!

Do you mean keyword relevance for your site? A properly optimized site with relevant keywords and phrases will received a highly traffic
from serious prospective buyers, which in the end, will better help those visiting prospects convert into buying customer

Originally Posted by sheena

Do you mean keyword relevance for your site? A properly optimized site with relevant keywords and phrases will received a highly traffic
from serious prospective buyers, which in the end, will better help those visiting prospects convert into buying customer

I take it you missed the point completely.

This is what Forrest is on about.

The link exchangers are so entrenched in the "relevant links only" silliness the spend waste their time getting useless links and are returning equally useless links. In their blinkered world there is no left or right, only relevance.
This is simply because they have "read it somewhere" that relevance is important for Search Engines.