Search Engine Academy of South Carolina

Latent semantic indexing adds an important step to a Website indexing process. It records which keywords a document contains, the method examines the Web site as a whole, to see which other sites contain some of those same words. LSI considers sites that have many words in common to be semantically close and ones with few words in common to be semantically distant. This simple method correlates surprisingly well with how a human being, looking at content, might classify sites. Although the LSI algorithm doesn’t understand anything about what the words mean, the patterns it notices can make it seem astonishingly intelligent.

(Keywords: Synonyms, related keywords, ontology, thesaurus, lexfn.com, l3xicon.com, Google sets, keyword relationships, “theme density” versus “keyword density”)

When the Florida update happened, if a page was targeting too aggressively, pages would be stopped and no more ranking. Most commercial sites were gaming the money pages and keywords at that time. Back then, search engines were trying to figure out whether text was natural or not. However, times and SEs (search engines) have changed.

In today’s search engines, (example) if the keyword phrase or term is “bass fishing” they can tell that the word “bass” is related to it and will highlight that in the search engines.

SEs are changing from “give me what I said” to “give me what I want.” They are moving to knowing what people are searching for, and it’s an ongoing activity to locate users’ true intent. (”…Google uses a best-in-class spelling suggestion system, an advanced synonyms system and a very strong concept analysis system, a world class localization system. . .”). So is something like latent semantic indexing used? Most certainly! In search queries–you’ll see the “related searches” at top or bottom–in other words, they “know.” Sometimes you can see where they screwed up mathematically. They are testing all the time, and it’s of course all about relevancy.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!