Ok, while reading through these forums and asking questions, it seems that more and more questions seem to pop up in my mind.

Which kind of backlink would carry more weight?

My site is a mortgage site, so real estate would be a themed topic I am assuming. Would it be better for me to have a link from a real estate website on their links page which has a various amount of unthemed links, or would a link from a charter fishing site in their real estate links directory carry me further?

I am not sure if anyone would have a definate answer, but I am curious as to what info could be offered.

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Jeremy Morris
California Mortgage Brokers

I heard a lot about thematic links, and was wondering whether claims about thematic links having more weight could be sustantiated. Anyone ?

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Roger
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HDB flats and Singapore condo

Theme has the power
http://www.google.com/corporate/tech.html

We have test sites with 100's of non theme backlinks, no on page SEO, easy search terms, that are nowhere.

We have test sites with 1 theme backlink, no on page SEO, webmaster search terms, No.1 out of 3.5m.

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Land for sale Costa del Sol Apartment in Fuengirola for sale

Found another link stating that thematic links are important. Also discovered that thematic links weigh even more than on-page SEO.

http://www.webpronews.com/2004/0610.html

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Roger
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HDB flats and Singapore condo

So wait then are you saying the fishing site link would fair better? I have my link pages broken down into states, then just built an international page, other non related pages are on a Favorite sites page under titles "Home and Travel" and "Business and web related" I figure most of these are close enough theme wise to share links with. I only have a few not related at all and that is because they linked to me long ago and have kept me so I keep them.

Now correct me if I'm wrong but I believe having 55 link pages broken down with only say a max of 10 external links each. Is better then a couple of links pages with 250 external links. The 55 pages increases my website size and gives me extra internal links too. Am I right?

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Artist Directory for Blue Ridge mountains

Mountain land

North Georgia Real Estate

I think that theme is most important on the page you are placing the link on, not necessarily the whole site. So, if you are placing a link to real estate sites in Alabama, you should have content on that page that talks about Alabama real estate or Alabama or real estate.

Sward, "better" is a relative term. It is better for the people you are linking to if there are fewer outbound links. Personally, I think this is a better way of linking to other sites.

So, fisher318, I think you need to be a little more specific. I am not sure that G recognizes mortgages as being related to real estate, it is quite possible. I think the key is to have related content (ie: content that matches the anchor text of your link and the content of the page linking to) on the page the link will be on.

I've yet to see definitive evidence that Google uses "themes" to determine relevancy. The link to Google that appeared earlier in this thread said nothing about themes. It only said that it analyzes pages to determine how a specific keyword is used; it didn't say that it tried to assign a thematic category to a page or site.

I noted in another thread, that if you search for the word "home" on Google, you will get sites that have nothing to do with "home", such as NASA, Lycos, NY Times, etc. This goes to illustrate that Google's relevancy algorithms are largely affected by anchor text on backlinks. Google does not hide the fact that it is a popularity-based search engine, dependent entirely on what other pages think of one another.

If themes are so important, then can anyone describe what theme Yahoo would fall into? What about my sister-in-law's lame blog site where she writes about anything and everything? What theme is that? What about this site, is it a real estate theme, or a webmaster theme?

So to answer the question, links from another mortgage site are no more valuable than links from a fishing site.

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Steve Johnson, blogger
http://www.realestatehow.com
Tips for real estate agents on SEO and Website design

Is the link below considered back links to http://www.dreamshelter.com.sg ?
http://linkre.com/action.php?url=htt...on=go&id=63375

It seems to me that these are redirects, and was wondering whether they would be counted as backlinks. Anyone?

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Roger
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HDB flats and Singapore condo