How Google can determine trust

[goodroi]

Google is always trying to separate quality from spam. Sometimes they succeed and other times they completely screw up. Let's talk about the ways you can help convince Google to trust your website. Let's be clear - I am not claiming Google is currently using any of these. I am listing possible signals that I would use if I was a Google engineer. Many of these things may sound simple to you but I get many people asking me to review their under performing sites and often find these issues. Even if Google isn't using these signals these ideas smart for your business.

a) Use one of the original tlds like .com or appropriate country tld but more importantly avoid unusual tlds like .info, .zip, .work. The % of spam sites jumps exponentially when you compare .com with the cheaper & newer tlds. There are a bunch of reports from email filtering companies that complain about these domains, imho likely Google is seeing similar results with web spam & weird tlds.

b) Use https. Spam sites aren't likely to take this step and spending a few extra bucks says you are serious about your website.

c) Develop editorial backlinks aka backlinks that are embedded in relevant content with natural anchor text. If I was Google I would mostly ignore ROS links in the header and footer. Those types of links were hallmarks of paid links. High % of identical anchor text was also a easy way to spot paid links.

d) Make sure you have privacy policy, terms of service, contact pages and other administrative pages. Many spam sites don't take the time to do these pages. Even if it wasn't a possible trust signal you should do it because its good for business. Some governments require privacy policy, terms of service are good for legal protection and contact us is helpful for customers, journalists & potential business partners to reach you.

e) Intelligently monitor bounce rates. High bounce rates are not the kiss of death but they are a good way of finding bad user experiences on your site. If someone visits your online calculator I expect a high bounce rate or you need to make your calculator easier to use. If someone visits your sales video and leaves in 5 seconds, you probably want to rework that video or replace it with a better sales pitch. If I was a Google engineer I would monitor bounces back to the serps as a sign that search result didn't satisfy the user and should rank lower. As a business owner I keep an eye out for

f) Build a brand. If I was a Google I would want to see at least some searchers typing in your brand name into the search box. This is a good signal you can be trusted because no one (almost no one) would type in a spam site into the search box. What are you providing on your site that would make people specifically seek out your site and type in your domain or brand name on Google?

g) Get social. Spam sites don't take the time to build a coordinated network of social accounts. Popular brands do take the time to use different social platforms. If I was a Google engineer I would love to look for this signal. Even if Google isn't looking or can't crawl a social page you should still do it if you can connect with customers. Many webmasters used to rely on Google for their business, they diversified their traffic and now gain most of their profit making traffic from places like facebook, twitter, pinterest.

What would you add to the list?

[martinibuster]

Data is a commodity. Good data can command a price. For example, I sell a subscription to a newsletter. The information is so good I withhold it from WebmasterWorld and from published articles on SEJ and on my blog. I do not give away information of that quality level. The data is now a commodity that I sell.

I have other information that is traded to site visitors in exchange for their viewing my ads and occasionally clicking on an affiliate link and buying something. That information is not free either, it is a commodity that cost me time and effort to create (although it seems free and may be free to many site visitors).

Here's another example. Good quality data can cost a premium. I have paid large sums of money to a single author for high quality authoritative articles. I have paid peanuts for other articles. In both examples I got what I paid for. The articles, information/data, was a commodity.

Information is a commodity. One can grow vegetables in their garden and give them away. That's a choice. Similarly one can treat information in the same way one treats any other grown or manufactured product and figure out ways to commodify it or give it away with minimal strings.

[bakedjake]

Use https.

I'd go further:

An EV SSL certificate is a very good potential indicator of trust, because it requires the website operator to identify itself and prove that it is who it says it is through publicly available records.

[bakedjake]

Citation velocity is also a measure of trust, at least in the context of search. It's likely a user searching for a term will be interested in a document that is receiving lots of citations right now regarding that term.

This is why PR is still very good SEO, and why social is important.

[NickMNS]

@martinibuster do not confuse information with data. What you sell in your news letter is information not data. A news letter showing published data is would be a very boring read.

The data are the basic bits that when analyzed and aggregated correctly can produce usable and sellable information. Data on its own is useless.

There are many aspects of data which will determine its value, but like most anything else, value is in the eye of the beholder. One person's "commodity" data, can be high value data for another. It all depends on what you hope to derive from it.

One other point to make is that data is everywhere, like air. With the current advances in NLP and other datasciences, things that were previously unusable as sources of data are now becoming veritable gold mines.

[hanish77]

Buyers base buy choices to some degree on trust. Google is dealing with approaches to algorithmically decide trust, trying to send searchers to the best destinations.Consider how you settle on a vast buy choice. Perhaps you look into determinations and read audits. Perhaps you get some information about a brand, a site, or an item. Possibly you need the master sentiment of a salesman or the certainty that analyzing the physical item gives. Perhaps you analyze costs and strategies, such as transportation and return

[edited by: engine at 6:36 pm (utc) on May 31, 2016]
[edit reason] Please see WebmasterWorld TOS [/edit]

[Storiale]

Trust is about quality of sites that link to your site, diversity of sites, relevancy of linking sites, age of domain name (and pages), Name Address & Phone number... diversity of anchor links, mix of text and image links... relevance of social sites (same subject matter as site).

No link networks, very low amount of low quality sites linking to it. no links purchased from spammy sites.

[Jack_Hughes]

The SSL signal won't work now. There are free (and perfectly legitimate) SSL certificate providers out there so even the most spammy site can now use HTTPS.

[robzilla]

The SSL signal won't work now. There are free (and perfectly legitimate) SSL certificate providers out there so even the most spammy site can now use HTTPS.

Doesn't change that Google probably prefers to send users to an HTTPS destination.

[edited by: robzilla at 5:38 pm (utc) on Jun 1, 2016]

[NickMNS]

@Robzilla Google may prefer SSL, but do they consider it as a direct sign of Trust? I am not sure.

[robzilla]

No, it's probably not a trust signal by itself -- not unlike PageRank, for example.

[Wilburforce]

it's probably not a trust signal by itself

I'm not sure anything is a trust signal by itself, but I think most of what has come up so far in this thread - including https - probably has some bearing on it.

[tangor]

Google Trust = correct politics and open checkbook

Everything else is window dressing.

[robzilla]

I'm not sure anything is a trust signal by itself

I'm not sure, either, of course. I don't know how all the parts fold together, but it does make sense for Google to look for the things that makes people trust a webpage. Whether that then becomes a bundle of "simple" signals (which sounds old-fashioned) or something more multi-faceted and complex (e.g. self-learning AI), I have no idea.

In regards to HTTPS, I just don't think a SSL/TLS certificate with domain validation is worthy of any trust per se. I do wonder if this might be different for certificates with organization validation or extended validation, but that would mean placing trust in the certificate authorities who do the vetting.

[toidi]

Trust is in the eye of the beholder and google only sees dollar signs. My niche is dominated by sites that have zero experience in the niche and are notorious for containing wrong and outdated info, but they have really good tv commercials.

Data, information, and content all have nothing to do with any trust factor with google and the public. If it did, the web would look completely different. In my niche, bad data gets top billing and in ecommerce the overpriced products get top billing and the public sucks it up because they trust it, for now. More and more people are talking about how irrelevant search is and the solution is to skip page 1 of the results.

[glakes]

More and more people are talking about how irrelevant search is and the solution is to skip page 1 of the results.

Many people just skip Google entirely and go directly to Amazon. As you noted, Google gives overpriced products top view and many of these overpriced products are advertised in Adwords. The excessive CPC fees from Google gets passed to the end user, and at least some buyers appear to have figured that out and skip Google altogether when shopping.

[Wilburforce]

skip Google altogether when shopping

Shopping isn't the only thing people do. We're also interested, for example, in which sites are trusted for medical information (getting this wrong could have catastrophic consequences).

Even on shopping, we're not just looking at price, even if a lot of people have price as a high priority. I would certainly question the view that the cheapest provider is also the most trustworthy.

[Kelowna]

Google Trust = Having high page rank sites linking to you.

That is why they are now hiding page rank. If not so important, why hide it?

[EditorialGuy]

Google Trust = Having high page rank sites linking to you.

That may be one signal. It's unlikely to be the only signal, however.

[robzilla]

Google Trust = Having high page rank sites linking to you.

It's possible that high-PageRank sites are more likely to be on, or closer to those on, a seed list of trusted sites, if those are still used in any capacity. However, I would assume Google takes a more multi-faceted approach to trust evaluation these days.

That is why they are now hiding page rank. If not so important, why hide it?

If not so important, why show it? Who benefits? Who cares?

[Trueman]

Prepay your .com domain for a couple of years. In whois records this is the "Expiration Date" and may be an indicator to Google. Spammy websites will probably not pay 10 years up front for a domain they will rinse once it's blacklisted.

[Robert Charlton]

Prepay your .com domain for a couple of years.

This is an example of one of those things that was mentioned as a possibility in a Google patent but never used. It was listed way back in the Google Historical Data patent, and on the surface seemed to make sense.

There are numerous reasons for not implementing it, though. Many established and trustworthy websites might choose to test out a new host with a one-year registration. Also, not all TLDs publish expiration dates.

Matt Cutts did a video on the topic many years ago, in part to debunk claims from some registrars that long registrations would help Google rankings...

How much does a domain's age affect its ranking?
May 7, 2009 - trt 1:40
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1_1NQWQJ2Q [youtube.com]

Matt cites a conversation with Danny Sullivan on the topic, and there's Search Engine Land article discussing the video and the patent claims here [searchengineland.com...]

The language in the patent, btw, reads (my emphasis added)...

Therefore, the date when a domain expires in the future can be used as a factor in predicting the legitimacy of a domain.

...and was mentioned by tedster in this WebmasterWorld discussion which also includes some additional references on the topic...

Is Whois Data A Ranking Factor?
Oct 2011
https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4377941.htm [webmasterworld.com]

[Trueman]

Robert, thanks for your comments. There is indeed an issue when comparing prepaid domains with another TLD that does not publish expiration dates. Same issue probably applies for Google Analytics data. Some have implemented it on their website, some not. So it's hard to use that data when the other domain does not have signals at all.

Another reason to prepay for a couple of years is a certain level of resilience (I read of a guy recommending it in the Adsense forum in Webmasterworld, who had sudden health issues and was offline for a couple of month, and having issues with keeping his domains), but this is OT here.

[Robert Charlton]

Same issue probably applies for Google Analytics data. Some have implemented it on their website, some not. So it's hard to use that data when the other domain does not have signals at all.

Trueman, on this, and on several other points you made, you read my mind.

[buckworks]

Prepaying the domain for a long registration period might or might not affect what search engines think of your site, but there's no reason it should hurt. And as Truman points out there are practical reasons to stay well ahead in one's domain registrations.

Many details might have little effect individually, but together they start to create a pattern and that's what can support or undercut your overall signals of quality.

Many small decisions can safely be made on the basis of "Might help, won't hurt." Get 'em done then move on to other things.

[tangor]

Google might not be sure regarding "intent" but I personally view an ex-date of 2026 as a sign of intent. :)

[Walt Hartwell]

I don't know.
I typically use a 1 year registration to see how things develop. Meaning I'm not in total control of how a site might perform over the next 12 months.
If it does well, I'll wing another 12 months.
I can't really envision registering a site for the next 10 years unless it's just the best ever, nobody thought of this, I'll make a million overnight type site.

[tangor]

Spammers won't make a commitment, period. They are churn and burn and usually not "quite right" domain names unless by accident they hit a gold mine.

G and the others, too, have back info re: length of registry and that does give a bit to trust.

But that does not mean that a pre-pay to 2026 (example) is not just a blind for a churn and burn site either. Given today's rates for domain registrations that's not a roadblock for "evil".

[Wilburforce]

I can't really envision registering a site for the next 10 years unless it's just the best ever

That seems to me to divorce the site from the business. It isn't a question of how good the site is, it is a question of what my business is named and known as. If my trade mark is registered for 10 years, why wouldn't I register the domain name for the same period?

As a basic user experience I distrust businesses with domain names that are nothing like the business name, or reps using a gmail account to contact me. Why wouldn't Google look at those signals?

[toidi]

i will never again lock myself into a registrar for more than a year. If they sell out i refuse to be locked in with a company i don't like. Been there did that.

[Wilburforce]

i will never again lock myself into a registrar for more than a year.

The registration period and the terms you have with a registrar are separate issues. You should be able to transfer a domain without penalty, and companies that tie your registration to their subsequent services are best avoided.