True Meaning of Themed Sites & The Level of Importance in the Ranking Algorithms

Aug 25, 2004 - 9:40 am 0 by
Filed Under Link Building

I have had the honor of exchanging several emails with Mike Grehan about some of the theories spreading around the forums and found in many articles at SEO sites. One such theory we discussed was the concept of "themed sites" and how you need a site within a specific theme to stay within that theme in order to rank above your competitors (keeping every other variable as equal). So people were taking the extreme action of buying a new domain name for each theme. Then only having information about that theme on that new domain.

Now Mike is about to release his 3rd edition of his search engine book and he has been researching some of these concepts in great detail. With his permission, I will try to convey what his thoughts are on this topic, but not take away the deepness of the "why" found in his book.

Mike asked Daniel Dulitz from Google this question on 'theming' (is that a new word?). ""Utility" and "depth" really should be measured by a site's users." What I understand this to mean, based on the examples given by Daniel, is that a site will not hurt in rankings if it contains pages off topic to the real essence of the site.

Example; I have a site on the Smurfs (why did I pick the smurfs, I have no idea) but on that site, I have a page or two on how I block spam with spamassassin, will that hurt my site for ranking well with Smurfs? Not at all, according to Daniel.

Now, will a site with detailed information on spamassassin rank better then the page found at the Smurfs site? Of course, at least that is the goal of the search engines.

So when people discuss themed sites and how they are the only way to rank well, it is believed that some are misunderstanding the concept of what a "theme" is. The search engines think of it as the "utility" and the "depth" of the site (in pages and content).

Disclaimer: I hope I did justice to what Mike has graciously communicated to me. Also, I do not have a page on smurfs, nor do I have a page on spamassasin.

I posted this over at Search Engine Watch as well.

 

Popular Categories

The Pulse of the search community

Follow

Search Video Recaps

 
- YouTube
Video Details More Videos Subscribe to Videos

Most Recent Articles

Search Forum Recap

Daily Search Forum Recap: November 4, 2024

Nov 4, 2024 - 10:00 am
Google Search Engine Optimization

Google Wants You To Stop Hiring SEOs & Paying For SEO Audits? I Highly Doubt It.

Nov 4, 2024 - 7:51 am
Other Search Engines

ChatGPT Search Is Powered By Bing's Index & More

Nov 4, 2024 - 7:41 am
Google

Google AI Overviews Highlight Feature Expands AI Responses

Nov 4, 2024 - 7:31 am
Google Search Engine Optimization

Google: Having Different Links On Mobile vs Desktop Pages Can Slow Crawl

Nov 4, 2024 - 7:21 am
Google Ads

Google Ads Adds Segmenting Option To PMax Asset Groups In Reports

Nov 4, 2024 - 7:11 am
Previous Story: DigitalPoint Forums Adds Blog XML Feed to User Title
Next Story: Hackers Hit Gmail