Site Radius Score Explained: How SEO Agencies Avoid Going Too Wide

James Dooley: Site radius score and why going too wide can actually harm your website. Today I'm joined with Germans Frolovs, who is an absolute semantic SEO guru, expert. Um, I love, I love listening to you. I love, obviously, sharing a lot of information back and forth, um, in the semantic SEO groups. You sharing the semantics, me sharing business knowledge. But this is a big one because we're seeing a lot more where people are thinking more content means more authority. They seem to go wider and wider and wider, and they end up writing content that's got nothing to do with their initial source context. Why is the site radius score one of the most important parts of semantic SEO, in your opinion, Germans?

Germans Frolovs: Yeah. So actually, we heard about site radius, I think it was May 2024, during the famous Google API Content Warehouse leak. Leaked document. And, uh, it kind of confirmed that, uh, topical authority probably is a thing. And, uh, in these internal algorithms of Google, basically it explained the site radius. It explained that every website has some kind of, like, mathematical centroid or mathematical midpoint, uh, based on its main topic, main focus. Uh, that is, that is known as this, that centroid. And that site radius basically measures how, uh, far a specific page or an article drifts away from that main topic. If you're drifting too far away, you're going to be outside of the radius. That's going to hurt your website.

James Dooley: Yeah. For us, we, we, like, internally tried to explain it to the team, and we did, like, Venn diagrams. And was basically saying that all the topics need to kind of go in the same bucket. And then when you start going wide and you start pulling away bit by bit, and doing more content that's not in the central bucket, and you start moving away, then because then they don't know which bucket you're part of. And when you can't put a book on a specific bookshelf, it doesn't know where, what book to put it on. And at that point, it's like, you've gone too wide. And there's the amount of times that we've bought websites, and the only thing we've done is deleted 70% of the content. And traffic's actually gone up. But more traffic might have only gone up a little bit, even though we deleted 70%. The amount of enquiries we got, like, 10X'd. There was hardly getting any enquiries. And all what we did was delete a load of content because everyone became obsessed with topical authority, didn't really understand what semantic SEO was, didn't really understand what a topical map was and a semantic content network was, and they just went so wide, it's unbelievable. But with regards to it, like, going too broad on a topical map, why can that damage SEO performance? So obviously, you're... I'm not an SEO. I'm definitely not experienced with regards to semantics like you are. I know deleting a lot of the content has been helping us. And we've been strategically looking for sites that have been hit that we think, you've just gone... You was a gardening site and now you're talking about gaming chairs. Like, you've just gone too far away from what your initial was. But why can going too broad in a topical map actually harm? Like, what's the reason for why it can harm SEO performance?

Germans Frolovs: Yeah. In, uh, my opinion, going too broad, uh, let's say, in the topical map, in that strategic blueprint, damages the performance because it creates this ranking signal dilution. You don't have a focus. Kind of, like, you are diverging from it. It increases the cost of retrieval for the search engines and, uh, kind of, like, violates the whole source context, uh, match with what you're actually covering on the website. But then again, if your website has topical authority on a specific domain, you can slowly, you know, expand the site radius if you are connecting the next, uh, let's say, the topic, the next core topic, slowly but surely. And in the, let's say, the whole website or business universe, it can be connected. You can see, uh, news websites and many other websites that have huge authority, domain authority, but also topical authority. They can actually rank for almost anything and everything. So in that case, I think there are some, uh, some exclusions to that, to that mechanism.

James Dooley: Yeah. So on that there then, like, explain to people with regards to semantic SEO, what is the difference between topical expansion and topical dilution?

Germans Frolovs: Yeah. So topical expansion would be, uh, basically the process of increasing the website's vastness, covering more concepts, going kind of, like, maybe horizontally, uh, and, uh, depth. So going deeper into an existing one to establish that comprehensive knowledge base, uh, in, in your knowledge domain. But topical dilution essentially occurs when the website publishes, uh, the discordant or the irrelevant content that breaks the, let's say, that centroid where it should live. So I still think expansion is completely fine and needed within that, uh, core topic space. Uh, and, uh, you can go faster and faster and expand more. But, uh, yeah, just need to be wary of when does the topic end. That's why, actually, I, uh, highly suggest... Well, we talked about the topical map, uh, high-level creation process and defining those five components. It basically will tell you how far to go. And then you don't even need to worry about, uh, you know, never ending the topical map because you keep discovering new topics. If you have the core components set up, you have those topical borders. You will not end up, uh, basically finding new topics and, uh, expanding your topical map any more.

James Dooley: Yeah, for sure. And this, I'd say, this is probably one of the most talked-about, um, topics, um, the site radius score. And I've got a question from someone within, um, the SEO community, and they've asked, "How do you know when a topic is outside the website's natural topical radius?" It's a very good question.

Germans Frolovs: It's very hard to answer. I, I, I, I have, uh... I mean, there are some indications. Uh, on a page-by-page basis in Google Search Console, you can see easily connections. As long as you keep seeing those connections, you can expand across those. Uh, I would say maybe from the kind of, like, vectorising the topics, uh, and putting them in vector embedding space, uh, you could visualise how far they are from or how connected they are. I think in Screaming Frog you can, you can do this kind of analysis and see, uh, in a, uh, vectorised... You can vectorise your website and essentially see how tightly connected your, uh, pages are. And probably you will see some that are in a vector space. Essentially, if they are, uh, if they are further, then probably it is outside. And there are similar techniques that you can use to, uh, to measure that. But honestly, I don't have a mathematical explanation nor tool that I use. It just comes from lexical relations. Uh, just, yeah, more like...

James Dooley: Let me, Germans, let me do one or two follow-on questions on that. Obviously, that came from the, um, semantic community. So with regards to not knowing, because I don't think there is a magic formula. I don't think there is a score, basically, and turn around to you and say, "Oh, here's your site radius score and whether you're within that Venn diagram or you're not in that Venn diagram." There's so many topic overlaps, like you've said. If I gave you a website and I go, "Germans, you are the semantic SEO guru. I want you to decide, is this topic, is this page within my natural topical radius?", which is what the person's asked, and you're uncertain, would you open the page or not open the page? And if you did open the page and, let's say, six months later it didn't get any clicks, would you then compress it down into being part of an existing page? Let's work it that way in a real-life example where you're uncertain. How would you go about that with regards to you're wanting to expand on specific topics as long as it's related to who you are and what you do and why you're brilliant? But then again, is it within the site radius score? We don't know. What methodology would you do in that scenario?

Germans Frolovs: Uh, I never came to that scenario where I was unsure. Uh, because typically when, when you build out the topical maps, you would... I don't know, after a while you build that confidence that, yeah, is this relevant or not. Uh, but, uh, that, that is one strategy. Of course, you, you can, you can, you can try to do. I have seen different cases where actually you rather create a different website for that only one domain, uh, because smaller websites, uh, with more focused topical maps are just ranking better, faster. Uh, so, so in some cases, uh... So I don't have an answer to that question. I would, uh, if, if I would see a specific example, then I could say yes, create or not, and why. And then also probably then consider, if not, then, uh, have a specific website on that one smaller, let's say, topical map.

James Dooley: Yeah. Like, within... We've discussed this quite a lot because the site radius score is probably one of the most talked-about, kind of, topics within the private groups. And what it seems to be is that there is a... There is a divide, which means I don't think there is any specific right. Where some say they would add it, if it's a specific question, let's say, or something, they would add it into an existing article as an H2. If it started to get the search volume, they might then decide to break off as a different article. Some would say, "You know what? I think I just... The SERP is telling me that some of us have broken it off, therefore I'll break off a different page." And if it doesn't get the rankings or the impressions and the clicks, you could then just delete it, 301 it as being a subsection of an existing page. And then some of them now have started to talk about, "I think this is outside my site radius score, and therefore I'll do it on what, um, Koray is now talking about, wasteful domains." So it'll create a brand-new domain, which is what you're talking about there, which could be an exact match, a very close topic to what you are about, but maybe slightly different context, where they go, "I'm going to put... I'm going to do a different site, be very laser-focused on that. I'm not going to add the new category onto this site, and then let's see how that works." And the wasteful domains, like you said there, they seem to be working very, very well. Laser-focused, single topic. Like, we're just within one category. You're not trying to break them off and stuff like that. But it's such a... It's such an open discussion with regards to the site radius score.

Germans Frolovs: Yeah. But there's no metric. There's no model. Like, you choose the different model, you will have a different site radius score. We had this discussion with a few people in the recent conference as well. And, like, there's no uniform answer to it. It's kind of, like, yeah, how we perceive, how we model the topics and so on. Uh, but I like your approach as well. And definitely the wasteful domains, it's becoming a term now. Maybe that's going to start trending soon.

James Dooley: It always, it always kind of worked, to be honest with you. It doesn't even need to be wasteful domains. It could just be, um, like Jason Barnard was, was a big, um, help to me with regards to third-party corroborative sources. There's certain things on your website that, if you're thinking is going to be on your website, which sits better on another website, which is talking about you, which looks like a third-party source, which makes you sound better. So if you was to do this, at times you might do comparison articles on your own website. If I went and did a comparison article saying James Dooley versus Germans, and I said James Dooley is better than Germans, but I've written it, that's a first-party source and it doesn't really carry much weight. Where if you went to do it on a third-party website, which it wasn't you that's written it, that says James Dooley is better than Germans, that carries so much more weight because it's on a third-party corroborative source. It's not one of us saying it. It's somebody else saying that I'm better. And therefore, there's times there's certain pages where it goes, "I'm not even going to open up that category. I'm going to open it up within my backlink profile or within exactly the thing," which then can come back to it. And this is, this is all comes back down to now how far do you go with the site radius score on the site, and how far do you not go? I've seen so many good examples where they have put it on the website, and it's feeding the large language models like ChatGPT and Gemini and Perplexity and Claude. And therefore you're saying, well, actually, because it's feeding it and it's now being a source on your own website, you should cover it. So it's one of them that it's, it's becoming slightly more than just Google. Now it's starting to be, well, this could also feed the LLMs. And therefore, if the LLMs start picking up your brand, it might start getting more branded search for who you are, what you do and why you're freaking brilliant. And therefore then it starts to level up your whole site because you're getting more branded search as well. So it's... I feel like the, the things seem to be changing nowadays with the site radius score and what people are doing. But it's an interesting... It's certainly an interesting topic. I also, uh, had a practical, kind of, like, rule for this before. That, like, if you can connect a cluster to another cluster with at least one step in between, it probably is going to be okay, right?

Germans Frolovs: Yeah. And, and connect it to the core section with one step in between. It's probably not going to be too far. Uh, so that could be another, perhaps, a rule or, like, a mental game that you could play, uh, to find, for figuring out, uh, whether it is going to be outside or not.

James Dooley: Yeah, that's quite a good game to play, to be fair. There's one last question from the community with regards to the site radius score. And it says, "When is it safe for a website to expand into adjacent topics, and how do contextual bridges help that expansion feel natural?"

Germans Frolovs: Yeah. I would say, uh... Well, actually, related to that game that I just mentioned, I would always prioritise just, like, covering the one cluster at a time. And then after that is covered, you can just expand on top of it. Naturally, once you cover one cluster, uh, in, in, in full, you will get more, uh, basically ranking queries for that cluster. And then you will even start to see rankings for the keywords that you haven't covered in that cluster yet. So that's a natural way to expand, looking at the GSC, uh, data and so on, and just, uh, expanding that way. And, uh, yeah, definitely any kind of, like, adjacent related entities, that's, uh, that's a next logical step to expand. And, uh, like we also discussed, with more topical authority, with more domain authority as well, you are going to be let go and forgiven if you go too broad, uh, in these cases. And through contextual bridges, through internal links, and again, as long as you can connect from this cluster to the next one with one link, it's connectable, so it should be fine.

James Dooley: Yeah, for sure. I think the whole thing there is the semantic content network then comes into play of how you're going to be connecting these topics together. And if you can connect them together, it can stay on the site. I think also... I think anyone who's looking at the site radius score, I'd love you to leave a comment. Like, have you got any horror stories where you have gone too broad and it's harmed your whole website rankings? I'd love to know about this. I'd love to know whether you've got your own internal scoring mechanism for the site radius score. Because for us, like, there's so many of us that are discussing it and we're going, "How far is too wide? Can we connect it? Can we not connect it?" There's some people that are throwing relevant topics on the site, but they're orphan pages. And, like, there's just so many different things that's going on with the site radius score. I'd love to know technically what people are doing. Germans, it's been an absolute pleasure. Make sure you check out all the other, um, episodes. Make sure you check out the difference between a topical map and a semantic content network. The semantic content network's a big part, in my opinion, of the, um, the whole site radius score and how far you can go and how things are being connected. Germans, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you very much.

Germans Frolovs: Likewise. Thank you.