Relevancy

[theJack]

It seems like there are two major factors with relevancy for search results - on-page and off-page. On page is obviously things on your page...the URL, title, keyword density, etc. The offpage is the IB links and the quality of those links with relevant anchor text. I've read that Google also uses the relevancy of the page giving you the IBL to determine the quality of the IBL for your ranking. For example,

A third party page with good onsite relevancy for 'widgets' (widgets in the URL, title, etc) that links to my page for widgets means alot more than a third party page with irrelevant content (about gadgets for example) that links to my page about widgets. Assuming the anchor text is 'widgets' in both examples.

My question then is, does google also examine the quality of links to that third party page to determine the quality of the link to my page? My guess would be no, that google just looks at the onsite relevancy for pages linking to my site. Otherwise, there would be a almost infinite recursive problem of constantly looking at the next page back that linked to the page in question.

Anyone with some insight into this question? thanks.

[Jim]

Originally Posted by theJack

does google also examine the quality of links to that third party page to determine the quality of the link to my page

Here's my theory:
Let's assume that there are 5 sites giving link to the site A with the anchor text "widgets". And there is another site (B) with many IBLs but none of them have the word "widgets" on the anchor text. Then, both of these sites (A and B) give a link to your site with the anchor text "widgets". Now at this point, I think it's possible (and would make sense if it's applied by Google) that Google puts more value to the link of site A than the link of site B.

Never thought deeply about this though.