Evolution of Ranking Factors - Shift Towards Trust and Authority

Over the last several years there has been a significant shift in factors determining site rankings in Google.  While the value of Page rank and on-page SEO have started to diminish, the anchor-text links  and especially domain Trust and Authority have gained much more significance.

A simple graph illustrating the time trend of the above factors is given in the post How Google’s Rankings Algorithm Has Changed Over Time by Rand Fishkin, whereas the major factors that affect a website TrustRank and Authority are considered in another video lecture Whiteboard Friday - Domain Trust and Authority by the same author.

In this post I will not reiterate the content of the above publications, as you can always refer to the originals. Rather, my purpose here is to analyse those publications and derive implications they bear for necessary changes in  link building strategies  if they are to be successful.

As the TrustRank, together with site Authority, are becoming exceedingly influential for ranking, I’d like to consider the crucial factors that determine both of them.

The summary of my post boils down to this:  If you want your website to rank high, you MUST incorporate and deploy a link building strategy that improves both your site Trust and Authority.  This concerns everything - your sites content, outbound links and inbound links. The following paragraphs detail necessary steps to be taken.

Domain Trust:

Inbound links

Background. Especially valuable are backlinks from Trusted domains. There are no hard and fast rules to determine the Trustrank of a domain, but generally links from authority sites like Wikipedia, Educational (*.edu, *.ac.uk), Goverment (*.gov), and Military (*.mil) organisations, popular social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Digg) and bookmarking sites (del.icio.us) can be safely assigned to Trusted sites.

With regard to less known websites, one should look at several factors -  in general if a website ranks high on competitive keywords for which they are optimised (titles, meta tags and/or page content), it’s a good prerequisite to a high Trust, but certainly not sufficient. You should also check  the backlinks of those sites and see who links to them - the more backlinks from generally trusted authorities (see above) and other highly ranking websites they have, the more likely their Trustrank is high too.

Finally, it’s worth checking their WHOIS records and find out who the site belongs too, when it was registered, and if there are any other domains assosiated with the same owner, check on them to make sure they do not look like spam websites.

Implication. You should try to get as many backlinks from Trusted domains as possible. Just a few backlinks from highly trusted websites may overwhelm the effect of thousands of links from ordinary sites. So, do not waste your time building just any kind of links, better concentrate on acquiring links from trusted domains by either link bait or by requesting a link directly from the owner.

Outbound links

Background. There is also so called Reverse Trust effect - when you link to spam websites or sites that themselves intensively link to spammers, your TrustRank is reduced and so are your ranking positions in SERPs.

Implication. Avoid linking to spamming websites or any kind of websites you suspect of linking to spam. If unsure, check backlinks of the suspected websites in Yahoo! (type link:www.website.com in Yahoo! replacing website.com with the URL of suspected domain)

Domain registration history

Background. To derive your TrustRank Google also checks your registration info - name, email, address, phone number etc. - to see if your are associated with (own) any other domains and whether websites on those domains have been involved in any spam activity, black hat SEO or any other unethical practices.

If they have, Google will take a note of this by lowering your trust rank and making all your new domains to pass through the sandbox filter, before they can achieve any sensible rankings. Even if you are not caught in any of those activities and your reputation is uncertain to Google,  your new domains are still bound to go through the sandbox stage.

Implication. Avoid engaging in any unethical activity that can undermine your Trust, especially if your reputation is clean and unmarked. Dont’ stain it -  save it for the better future to come. If you gain high enough Trust with Google, in the future your new domains may skip the sandbox effect completely.

User data signals

Background. To make sure your website and all site-related activity looks natural, Google collects information about it through all possible means -  Google toolbar, Google analytics and all kinds of 3rd party relationships all over the world.  In particular, Google is looking to see how long visitors spend on the site, which pages they visit, which links they click, where they go from that site and whether they come back after leaving etc.

By doing this,  Google wants to find out if the website is used in a manner that Google deems natural and that it provides information that users find interesting and valuable.  Occasionally they even review of websites manually and may either reward or penalise them depending on the results of investigation.

Implication. Fill your website with original, entertaining and informative content that your targeted audience is likely to find interesting and useful.

Domain Authority:

Authority is another factor that strongly affects website SERPs.

Link weight/PageRrank

Background. Neither Page rank, nor the link juice are any longer that important for ranking.  Having lots of links from many internal pages of a website does not improve your rankings much when compared to having just a single link.

Implication. There is no need to acquire multiple links from the same domain.

Diversity of link sources

Background. To rank high it is important to have more links from different independent domains. Independent in this context means belonging to different owners with different registration details and on servers with different IP addresses.

Implication. Concentrate on expanding diversity of your link sources - try to get links from more different domains, rather than multiple links from the same domains.

Analysis of Link growth rate

Background. If Google notice a sharp change in your link growth rate, they are very likely to attribute it to unnatural activity and are sure to penalise you for this either by imposing a filter on your site or totally banning it from index.

Implication. Grow your link mass steadily. Doesn’t matter at what rate you start building your link mass; choose any rate you feel comfortable with and stick to it during the whole link building campaign.

Analysis of link distribution

Background. Getting all of backlinks to your homepage looks to Search Engines unnatural  and your website will never rank high if you have 99% of links pointing to your home page. It tells the SE’s that your site content is not important and that all valuable information (if there is any) is contained on your index page.

Sites that fall into this category, will never acquire high Trustrank and, as a result, have very low chances of ranking high in SERPs, especially on competitive terms.

Implication. Build deep links to various internal pages from various independent sources on different domains. A good number of deep links will help you to build better Authority and, as a result, rank higher in Google.

Your Feedback

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