Published: 09 June 2026 by Dan Williams
One of the pieces of advice that I sometimes come across in SEO is Stay in your lane.
The idea sounds sensible enough.
If your website is about running, write about running.
If it is about stamps, write about stamps.
If it is about gardening, write about gardening.
All pretty simple really. And to a point, I think this advice is useful.
Yet the more I’ve read about embeddings, entities and large language models, the more I find myself thinking and trying to visualise what a “lane” actually is.
Let me explain.
A Word With 200 Dimensions
A while ago I was watching a video on Google’s developer channel discussing t-SNE visualisations and language models.
And one point stuck in my mind.
A single word could be represented as a point within a space containing hundreds of dimensions.
Not two dimensions, not three, but hundreds!
At that point my brain started protesting.
Because most of us think of words as dictionary definitions.
A language model does not. It thinks in relationships, connections and context.
A word is not simply a word.
It becomes a location within a huge mathematical landscape.
Words with similar meanings tend to occupy nearby regions.
Words used in similar contexts tend to move closer together.
Relationships begin to matter more than definitions.
Words Don’t Belong To One Lane
Take the word:
King
A human immediately understands several meanings.
A king may be connected to:
- monarchy
- queen
- crown
- palace
But the same word can also connect to:
- chess
- playing cards
- Stephen King
- Elvis Presley
The word itself does not belong to a single category.
It participates in multiple relationships simultaneously and the meaning depends on context.
That observation becomes interesting when we stop thinking about words and start thinking about topics.
What About Topics?
People often talk about topics as though they are boxes.
Running.
Stamps.
Gardening.
Technology.
Finance.
The implication is that a good website should sit neatly inside one box and remain there forever.
Yet I suspect topics are often closer to constellations than boxes.
Clusters of related ideas and groups of concepts connected in different ways.
Some tightly connected.
Some more loosely connected.
The edges are rarely as clear as people imagine.
The Centroid Problem
Recently I found myself reading about concepts called Site Focus and Site Radius.
These were found as part of the Google Content Warehouse leak, which hobo-web does a great job in explaining, and are usually explained as measures of topical concentration and topical drift.
In simple terms, siteFocusScore attempts to measure how strongly a site concentrates on a particular topic, while siteRadius measures how far individual pages drift from that site’s core theme.
As a mental model, I think that is useful.
Another article I went on to read elsewhere, explained this using the concept of a centroid — a mathematical centre of gravity representing the overall topic of a web-page, theme or website.
However, I also think it risks becoming oversimplified if taken too literally.
If a single word can exist within hundreds of dimensions, then a topic is almost certainly more complicated than a single point on a chart or a geometric shape.
The centroid may be useful.
But it is only one summary of a much larger structure.
The shape of the content matters too.
The relationships matter.
The clusters matter.
The routes between them matter.
My Own Website
This is where things become personal.
If you’re curious about the background behind the running, stamps and eBay examples used throughout this site, it’s covered in my About page.
A simplistic view of my website might see:
- running
- stamp collecting
- eBay
Three unrelated subjects, or three different lanes, or three different audiences.
And perhaps that is true at first glance.
But when I look at the articles with a more holistic head on, I see something else.
Curiosity.
Observation.
Investigation.
Analysis.
Trying to understand how things work.
The subjects change although the thought process remains remarkably similar.
A report about an FKT attempt.
An article about stamp varieties.
A discussion about eBay recommendations.
They are different topics.
Yet they emerge from the same place.
The Common Thread
I suspect this is the part many discussions about topical focus don’t articulate.
Topics do not exist independently of the people creating them.
The connections are often provided by the author.
The reason my website contains articles about running, stamps and eBay is not because I chose three random subjects.
They are things I genuinely spend time doing.
Thinking about.
Investigating.
Writing about.
The connection already existed before the website did.
The subjects change.
The curiosity does not.
Staying In Your Lane Isn’t Wrong
To be clear, I don’t think staying in your lane is bad advice at all.
Topical focus, coherence and expertise all matter.
A website about stamp collecting probably shouldn’t suddenly start publishing articles about cryptocurrency, air fryers and celebrity gossip.
Not because those subjects are forbidden.
But because there is no meaningful relationship between them.
The problem isn’t the advice itself.
The problem is treating topics as rigid boxes rather than connected ideas.
Simpler Than You Think
At one level, staying in your lane really is simple.
Write about things you know.
Write about things you do.
Write about things you genuinely care about.
That alone would likely solve most problems.
More Complex Than You Imagine
At another level, topics, entities and relationships are far deeper than many people realise.
Modern systems appear to understand far more than categories.
They look at context, relationships, connections and meaning – and probably much more.
The web increasingly resembles a giant network of related ideas rather than a collection of isolated boxes.
And perhaps that is why I struggle with simplistic interpretations of topical authority.
The world is messy, knowledge is connected and people are complicated.
Sometimes the most interesting relationships exist between things that appear unrelated at first glance.
Closing Thoughts
The more I read about embeddings, entities and similar areas, the less convinced I am that topics are neat little containers.
That does not mean topical focus does not matter.
It clearly does.
But I think the conversation becomes far more interesting when we start thinking about relationships rather than categories.
Perhaps the simplest way I can put it is this;
Things that genuinely belong together often end up together.
Sometimes because they share obvious similarities.
Sometimes because the connections sit a little deeper.
And sometimes because the person creating them was the link all along.
— Dan Williams
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