When you look at a Google SERP, the results usually have a “Cached” and a “Similar pages” link.
If you click “Similar pages”, it brings up pages from other domains that are supposed to be related to that particular page, but the selection is based on a logic that’s hard to fathom. Some of those “related” pages are not even similar in topic, while some others are just very loosely related, through a third party etc.
It’s a thoroughly useless feature in Google’s search engine.
But not every result has “similar pages”. Sometimes you click and it says: “Your search – related:www.example.com – did not match any documents“.
That’s usually the case with relatively fresh pages but also with several months old sites.
There is a possibility that it’s part of the Google sandbox phenomenon.
By the sandbox phenomenon, I mean the following scenario:
Your site and its pages are indexed. They may receive lots of traffic from Google. They may rank for a lot of queries. But somehow there are a couple of queries you just can’t rank for, although even pages shown in the top ten have less content, worse technical layout and an inferior link profile compared to your page.
Then one fine day, something happens and you start to rank for stuff you should’ve ranked almost from day one. You’re out of the sandbox. Your site is finally inducted to Google’s trusted circle.
It would be interesting to check whether there is a correlation between sites getting out of the sandbox, and gaining their “Similar pages” lists.
Why do I think they could be related? The time frame for both seems to be on the same scale, 6-12-18 months, depending on the topic of the site.
Just an idea.
Tags: google, sandbox, similar pages
