Is Google raising the LSI element in the algo? I have thought for a while now that Google is using some sort of semantic element in their algorithm, but now I think it has been increased. LSI will totally turn on its head the importance of on topic linking, and a lot of the sites that have ‘bombed’ their way to the top will take a hit. For those of you who do not know what Semantics is, the dictionary says….Latent Semantic Indexing (originally known as LSA, Latent Semantic Analysis) is a theory and method for extracting and representing the contextual-usage meaning of words by statistical computations applied to a large corpus of text (Landauer and Dumais, 1997). The underlying idea is that the aggregate of all the word contexts in which a given word does and does not appear provides a set of mutual constraints that largely determines the similarity of meaning of words and sets of words to each other
Put simply, we have moved on from Results by numbers, and onto results through understanding of content.
Why do I feel that Google has upped the anti on this? As some of you might know, I am a rugby nut, I eat sleep and breath rugby, I watch it, I coach it (at under 8 level) . Next year is the Rugby World Cup, known as RWC 07! Ok so there am I carrying out some keyword research for my rugby world cup website 😀 When I type into Google RWC 07 lo and behold, there at the top of the search is a site with the title ‘ Rugby World Cup 2007 ‘ BUT the ‘Rugby World Cup’ element has been highlighted as being what I have searched for. Try it, and see what I mean.
This would certainly go some way to explaining the constant changes in the SERP’s that many are reporting.
Not only that, try it with “SEO” or even “WRU”.
But surely this just means that Google has a database of acronyms and its not necessarily semantics?
Not necessarily Semantics, in this example, but it is removing other RWC acronyms as well, which indicats some understanding. I have noticed it with some other keyword research also.