Google's 'related:' operator
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I have a quick question about Google's 'related:' operator when viewing search results. Is there reason why a website doesn't produce related/similar sites?
For example, if I use the related: operator for my site, no results appear.
https://www.google.com/#q=related:www.handiramp.comThe site has been around since 1998. The site also has two good relevant DMOZ inbound links. Any suggestions on why this is and any way to fix it?
Thank you.
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Anything ever come of this, folks? Just noticed this about our website (https://www.google.com/#&q=related:epicwebstudios.com), but also noticed MOZ now has related sites appearing. So does Thom's Handiramp site. Still probably not a huge deal but I going nuts trying to understand where the "related" is being generated and how we can help improve the graph by improving our website. FWIW, all of the aforementioned tips have been applied to our site, epicwebstudios.com.
-- David -
With "related:" - you could say all the same things with Moz.com, and we also don't have the related results, but I doubt it's hurting our search rankings at all.
Regarding Dmoz - there's no particular way to get Google to recognize Dmoz listings and include them. They seem to do so sometimes and not others. You can actively prevent them using that listing with the noodp tag, but there's no way to do the reverse and get them to pay attention. One thing you might try is making sure they've actually crawled & indexed the page on Dmoz with your listing recently. If they haven't (you can look at the cache date in Google's results), you might try linking to it, using "Fetch as Googlebot," etc.
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Hi Rand/Matt, I understand your answer but I really think there is something more there. We have developed tremendous content, our site has been up since 1998. We have good PA and DA and no sense of any type of penguin type penalty. We have in the past dominated the SERPs often at the top slots. Then as Google added "brand" consideration to the mix we've been placed more middle of the first page (some have mentioned that this might be related to a panda hit but I don't think so when I look at the quality of our site versus the quality of the sites beating us). All of our competitors have "related" classifications and those related tags are page, not site related. Interestingly, our URLs will show up from time to time on the competitors related listings. I'm not sure how long this has been going on but I'm thinking that there is some sort of manual tag (I don't think this is a penalty of any sort) that Google has attached to our domain. I truly believe that the lack of a related tag some how is reducing our SERP ranking. I'd love to find an answer to this mystery.
On a related but separate note I've noticed that some of our competitors have another type of notation that shows up right next to the related/cache arrow that references DMOZ of Wikipedia listings. While we don't have a Wikipedia listing we do have a DMOZ listing, but that is not shown by Google either. Do you have any idea how to get Google to recognize our DMOZ posting? (I realize that DMOZ in it self is really pretty useless but if Google is recognizing it as important enough to list with the URL listings for some of our competitors there must be some value there.)
Any help or insight that you can provide would be much appreciated.
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Hi Thom - unfortunately, I don't have much to give you, but I can say that this isn't necessarily a problem. Tons of sites that do really well in search results, have popular brands, and are legitimate don't have "Related:" results. Moz itself is one, but we've seen others. There may be elements about Google having issues understanding your content or not seeing many powerful links from sources to your site that also link to other places, but we don't know for sure.
Long story short - if you're not seeing other issues with your site in Google, I wouldn't worry about it.
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