LDA is not a magic bullet for SEO (but it’s still pretty cool)
Patti’s post recapping the ninja’s brainstorming session for LDA applications was enthusiastic, and rightly so, but it seems as though our position has been misunderstood. I’ve followed the buzz all weekend, and I have some clarifications to make.
Yes, LDA has been around awhile.
This isn’t a brand new thing. In fact, it’s been around since 2002, and its direct ancestors (LSI, etc.) have been around for decades longer than that. The awesome thing about the work SEOmoz has presented around LDA is that it can help us to achieve a deeper understanding of the need for keywords to be supported by topically relevant vocabulary and gives us a clearer picture of how much it figures into Google’s algorithm.
Yes, we know that content always has been important.
There’s a reason why we employ a team of content writers. There’s a reason why we don’t build sites entirely in flash. There’s a lot of history behind the classic SEO adage that “Content is king.” Content always has been important! It’s even been the party line from Googlers like Matt Cutts for ages. How many times was an SEO question posed to Mr. Cutts met with that answer? “Concentrate on creating a website with high quality content,” they said, over and over. How many times have we rolled our eyes at that answer?
The difference the new LDA research has made, though, is that it’s not just about pounding your keywords over and over. It’s not about keyword stuffing, keyword density, or some old conventional wisdom about concentrating on one keyword per page. It’s about recognizing that different topics have different vocabulary. It’s about teaching a search engine (or an SEO tool) that Lady Gaga, Britney Spears and Justin Bieber all tend to go in the same pop star bucket. And even that is an oversimplified explanation.
Now take all of the complexity of how we naturally talk about different subjects and develop a tool which, all else being equal, more often than not is able to accurately predict rank order according to topical relevance to a given keyword. THAT is what we’re excited about.
Yes, links (and other factors) are still important.
Very, very important, in fact. But maybe slightly less so than we previously thought, given the correlation data we’ve seen about the LDA tool.
A fantastic example of this is Eyes.com, which, according to the LDA Tool, beats the pants off AllAboutVision on relevance to LASIK. However, AllAboutVision totally kills Eyes.com in the SERPs. Why? It’s likely due to the difference in the root linking domains – Yahoo! Site Explorer shows that Eyes.com has 428, while AllAboutVision has 46,905. The best content on the planet can’t overcome such a vast link deficit.
So if we already knew that content is important, and LDA isn’t new, and linkbuilding is still important, then why is everyone so excited?
Good question. I think it boils down to three things: (1) a renewed depth of understanding of the importance of linguistic relevance, (2) the emergence of a tool which can help us better gauge that relevance, and (3) a sense of awe having caught a glimpse of the sophistication of the Google algorithm. Even Rand has said that the SEOmoz model is likely very simplistic in comparison.
Someone asked Ben during his presentation how we could apply all this to SEO. His response was that he is a scientist, not an SEO, and that the application was up to us. Afterward, a gentleman seated near me asked me what I thought and how I expected to use it. There was an obvious question to be answered for everyone, and so while everyone else was buzzing about LDA and content relevancy, we decided to come up with some practical ideas on how to apply it. At the end of the day, though, this is not the magic bullet. Patti said as much in her post, but that message seems to have been lost on the skeptics who derided the whole thing by saying exactly the thing she had already said. LDA is not going to solve all of your SEO problems. Just as with all SEO tools, it’s still up to you to look at the data, analyze it, and figure out how to apply it to your own websites. The tool is only as good as you are.
October 15th, 2010 at 3:25 pm
[...] tool. Heck, we did our own post about it here after it was announced at the Mozinar in Seattle, and another one here after we realized what a controversy it was turning out to be. Rand Fishkin explains it quite well [...]
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