LDA – More Important than Inbound Links

Ben Hendrickson In probably the most important search ranking news in 2010, Ben Hendrickson of Moz announced his findings yesterday at the SEOmoz PRO conference in Seattle. He’s discovered that LDA for a page vs. the search keywords has a higher correlation with rankings in Google than the number of unique IP addresses or unique domains linking to the page. LDA (Latent Dirichlet Allocation) is a measure of how relevant a page is to a given search phrase by analyzing how often the search phrase is seen in documents that also contain elements of the text on the target page. This is earth-shattering news for the SEO community, as his findings indicate that real relevance of the on-page text to the search phrase is more important in the Google search ranking algorithm than links or anchor text.