Trust.... how to increase trust?

[rb77]

Hi,

1 of my sites has been sat on pages 2 & 3 for a while now, purely on the content and internal linking I’ve done and the Website arcitecture.

Now I may be wrong but I believe that the only thing stopping it from breaking through to p1 for countless searches is trust.

I’ve never embarked on any form of link building but my feeling is that nows probably the time to do so. Is the best way to build trust by obtaining links from “seed” or other trusted Websites with as short a distance between the linking pages as possible?

Also, how bigger deal is trust in Google’s eyes?

My site has many other boxes ticked such as 3DS, trust marks from gateway providers etc and detailed about and contact pages.

Cheers

[martinibuster]

I'm Roger Montti, I've published several articles about those algorithms, including an article with about 12,000 words in it with full citations to relevant research papers. I've been writing about these algorithms dating back a few years to as recently as this year. I'm very familiar with those algorithms. :)

Google's algorithm and the different parts of it is not a trust algorithm.

The algorithm papers state that it starts with a set of "trusted" sites. That's it.
There is no thing called "trust" that is being measured, ranked or propagated.

Algorithms like this are just a way to obtain a more accurate meaning from the link signal. Link signals are inherently noisy. So this is a way to cut out the static and get to the meaning.

Links matter, but so does user intent and user intent type signals. That's why your on page factors have been so successful.

So the role of links for your site can be seen as a way to validate that it is useful, popular, and what people are looking for when they are researching/buying for X.

Don't get hung up on the details of seed sets. Focus on the people in front of and behind the web page. ;)

[rb77]

Thanks Roger, that’s nice and clear.

I don’t suppose you want to point me in the direction of (in your opinion) the better articles about user intent?

To be honest I’ve only ever focused on what I consider to be building a logical Website that I’d be happy to by products from. I have a few number 1,2 & 3 spots ahead of companies that are turning over in excess of £30/m per year but the more competitive searches sees me just below pages 1 & 2.

Out of interest, how long does google take to actually take notice of a link pointing at a site and count it’s worth?

[martinibuster]

User intent signals is a reference to what the user wants when they make a query. If you look at the SERPs, they're ordered by user intent. That's why you sometimes see educational sites or Wikipedia at the top. That means the user intent, the most users, want to see information.

If you see an aggregation site, a site that has a comparison of various products or service providers, then it could be that user intent is about researching and that page that is providing a comparison has the user intent signals (on page signals) and probably off page signals, that indicate that this will satisfy that user intent.

SERPs aren't a listing of sites with the most links, or with the most links with that keyword in the anchor text. On page matters a lot, too. So, inbound links can have signals that indicate what kind of query that page satisfies.

[rb77]

Thanks Roger that great.

Just 1 more thing, I had a conversation with a guy at an agency who told me that google takes around 3 months to give value to a link, from its initial discovery.

Is this true?

[martinibuster]

Google's Penguin algorithm is real time. It's a part of Google's core ranking algorithm.

My opinion used to be about three to four months. But that's not my opinion anymore.

I think a link's effect is close to real time, which is about ten to fifteen days. BUT, you must reconcile that with the reality that the effect may not be enough to make any change in ranking, so it might not be anything observable to you.

Good luck!

;)

Roger

[rb77]

Thanks, Roger.