I am 100% certain that Andy is right and Leslie is
wrong because I have seen the results in my own
testing. Back in the days, I focused more on creating
articles that just mentions the keywords in the title
and several other places in the body. It used to
work very well, but doesn’t anymore. It’s now
obvious that the search engines READ the entire page
looking for words that SHOULD “thematically” relate
to what the article is about. If they don’t find
other such words, then they don’t give value to the
article in terms of the keywords the article is
targeting. So, whether it’s called LSI or whatever,
they DO use a system that reads the entire article
to find other “thematically” related words.

And like Andy has rightly said – even if the search
engines like Google use LSI or not, there are other
ranking factors that CAN make a page rank beyond LSI.
For example, if an article doesn’t bother with LSI
but has a gazillion high quality backlinks with the
keyword as the anchor text, it should rank – with or
without LSI. But the point is – to ensure your
articles do well, make it themed, so that whether or
not you drive backlinks to it, it will rank.

I was rather disappointed to say the least that an hour or so of writing that reply out in detail, it didn’t even make it to the comments section as no doubt it was deleted on site.

It instantly looked very much like it to me that the owners of StomperNet were only allowing comments which backed up their own position and did not allow for any other position to be discussed upon, showing up the video for what it was, a blatant piece of misrepresenting information to back up their own product relaunch i.e. referential indexing.

This I thought was extremely unprofessional and it’s completely put me off ever looking at StomperNet as a viable and professional source of information for IM’ers online.

Surely, they at least could have demonstrated the good manners to allow an opposing opinion to be posted up? I’m guessing here that mine was not the only comment defending LSI and keyword theming to be deleted on site, even though much care and time had been put into those replies there.

That in my opinion is simply bad manners.

Many thanks for posting this up here above Andy.

Kindest regards.

Mark

It’s the LSI paradox and the inherent problem of semantics. Not everyone uses the same words to mean the same things. Meanings change over time. Words and their usage come and go.

Surely the LSI mathematical problems and scalability are well documented. Even years back. There are several patents, but Google didn’t have to register them, because they purchased Applied Semantics.

Do semantics exist? Yes, look at any page with AdSense ads. You’ll see that the algo tries to extract meaning from the content to place relevant ads.

On the organic search side of things, the term LSI in the SEO community has come to mean “themeing up” a website. I’m sure a few years from now, when you look up the meaning of LSI, it will probably say, “It’s the practice of linking thematically related pages together to boost search engine rankings.” …or something to that effect.

So just like “rap” used to mean knock, potatoes became spuds, sofa became couch, LSI was a mathematical paper, now it means themes. And therein lies the paradox and the inherent problem of semantics.