Trusted Site SEO: Build Trust Authority SEO

If the title makes no sense, its because some of your queries make no sense. Oh, I understand well enough what some people are looking for (and it ain’t Jerry Brassfield — geeze, that guy is popular). You’re looking for the scoop on Trust. Many of you seem to think it has something to do with TrustRank.

That’s what you get for reading SEO forums and blogs.

SEO Myth: TrustRank Links Count

Let’s put this one to bed, okay? TrustRank is a Yahoo! algorithm, not a Google algorithm. TrustRank is not really separate and distinct from PageRank. Rather, TrustRank is a modified PageRank, and TrustRank doesn’t work anyway. The same research group (from Yahoo! and Stanford) who proposed TrustRank came back and shot it down.

Not that many SEOs got the memo on TrustRank being a Yahoo! thing, or that it doesn’t work, or that it was replaced by something else. Simply because people see other people blibbering on about “TrustRank this” and “TrustRank that” they guess that TrustRank may be something they need to know about.

Or maybe I’m not giving enough credit to the skeptics among you who just want to know what the scoop is on TrustRank. Maybe you’re just toying with me and now I’ll start to see queries for “scoop on TrustRank” in my referral data.

I hate you.

SEO Myth: Trusted Site SEO

Is there is a different form of search engine optimization for trusted sites? No. Why would anyone think that?

Is there a form of search engine optimization that builds trust in a Web site? No. Why would anyone think that?

You cannot optimize trust. You cannot do much with trust. Trust is an intangible factor in search engine optimization. The search engines measure trust in some undisclosed fashion (that’s right: TrustRank doesn’t work - live with it). Maybe they score for trust, maybe they don’t. Maybe they only filter for trustworthiness without actually scoring anything.

I can think of a thousand ways to measure trustworthiness, each as unfeasible as the next.

But the truth is that if you want to build a trusted site then all you need to do is build a site that is worth trusting. While that may sound simplistic my point is that if you don’t do anything to manipulate search engine results the odds are pretty good that your site will earn some trust. Of course, it needs to have some content.

You don’t need links to earn trust. You can earn trust with links but you don’t actually need them.

And that is contrary to what I have said for years, I know, but what I mean is that you can actually earn some trust with a new site. Think of trust as credit the search engines extend to you until you prove you’re not trustworthy. They’re not going to position you next to Yahoo.com or Google.com but you get a chance to show your true colors.

Some spammers have admitted to aging domains so as to establish their trust footprint before loading those domains with spam. Some people have argued that registering domains through the same name spreads your trust pretty thin. Actually, based on what Matt Cutts has said, I would conclude quite the opposite: he pointed out that if you create 200 spammy domains then domain 201 may be looked at more closely. Whereas, it seems to me that if you create 200 trusted domains then maybe domain 201 will start off with some decent trust, too.

Search engines look at how we behave and then judge us on the basis of our behavior.

SEO Myth: Build Trust Authority SEO

You know you’re talking to someone who has been chugging the SEO swill when they start regurgitating SEO catch phrases like “trusted site links”, “authority site links”, and “relevant links”. If an SEO walks into your business and puts any two of “trust”, “authority”, “site”, and “links” together in one sentence, throw him out and call the pound. You’ve got a real dog on your hands.

Search engine optimizers are enamored with authority sites. I’m not entirely sure of what they think an authority site is. Does it bold every word? Does it sport a badge? Is it licensed, registered, and sanctioned with a secret government department? Do these SEOs confuse authority site with Jon Kleinberg’s expert page concept?

An expert page has two characteristics: its content is primarily about a specific topic; it links out to hub pages about the topic. A hub page is primarily about a specific topic and it links out to expert pages about the topic.

Topicality and expertise go hand-in-hand. Sadly, there is no way to measure quality and accuracy. Hence, any Wiki site can make its own hubs and experts. But does that give a site the weight of authority within a topic?

I’m just not sure of what people mean by “authority site”. One bizarre definition states that authority is “a measure of the quality (in the all-powerful opinion of the search engine company) of a given site, gauged by some combination of size, importance, relevance.”

Really.

Well, I don’t buy that hogwash. Prove it to me. Show me a so-called authority site whose links pass more value than, say, a link from Yahoo!’s directory (which isn’t particuarly relevant to anything, given that it is a directory with millions of listings and tens of thousands of topics).

Another resource says that “authority sites (or rather authority site status) is what you are interested in if you are in the hunt for top position on the search engines”. Sorry, that dog won’t hunt, either.

In a few queries, at least on Google, sites do actually sit in the top position. But for the most part only pages hit the top slot. If you don’t get no sitelinks with your listing you only have a page not a site in the top slot.

Not that such distinctions really matter. What you’re telling me is that any page that ranks first for “humbledy bumbledy diggedy doo, SEO is all crappy poo” must be an authority. And what if it only gets to that position through links? Or what if it only gets there through content? What if it uses both content and links to rank for “humbledy bumbledy diggedy doo, SEO is all crappy poo”?

If the page ranks first on one data center but second on another, is it an authority?

If the page ranks first in the morning but not in the evening, is it an authority?

This all sounds like another SEO myth:

SEO Myth: Links from top ranked pages count more

This crazy idea sounds just convincing enough to…well, convince people. Supposedly you can slap 1,000 words on a page and if the page ranks first for “humbledy bumbledy diggedy doo, SEO is crappy poo” then any link from that page that conveys the anchor text of “humbledy bumbledy diggedy doo, SEO is crappy poo” carries more weight than a link from, say, the second-ranked page for that expression.

That makes no sense at all. What if the link on the second listing is bolded and italicized? That should trip the old emphasis flag.

What if the link on the second listing repeats the expression?

What if the rankings are switched at night, or randomly reversed across multiple data centers?

What if a different page ranks first on some data centers?

Now, I would expect each data center to do its own ranking but I have no way of knowing if they share data at any point in the process. On the other hand, you still get only one link to work with. If that link is more valuable on one data center than on another then its value is not really derived from the page’s position in the search results.

So we really don’t know what an authority site is. That’s just a made-up expression SEOs like to throw around in their forum and blog posts to sound like they know what they are talking about. It’s equivalent to saying, “Well, I optimize for competitive queries and you don’t”.

Clearly only authority sites will rank for competitive queries. I guess the rest of us should just hang up our Web code and go home. We don’t stand a chance because we’re using the wrong definition of authority site and someone else has beaten us to the top of all the competitive queries.

The bottom line on trust and SEO

Does trust matter for search engine optimization? I think it does, at least to the extent that you want your own site to be trusted and you want your inbound links to come from trusted sites.

But I don’t think you should agonize over whether your links come from untrusted sites. For example, Matt Cutts has asked people to vote for new Webmaster Console features, which is a great idea but why did he include Option to “disavow” backlinks from or to a site ?

Is this more of Google’s skullduggery over paid links and spam? Are they trying to entice people to do more of their work for them? I have no doubt that cleaning up Google’s search results is a monumental task, but that is Google’s task not ours. I don’t care to spend my time reporting a whole lot of spam (unless, of course, it gets in the way of my search rankings — then make it easy for me to report the scumbags).

The point is that we still own the Web and we can still decide what to do with it. This post, like several others on SEO Theory, was written largely as a means of responding to some interesting queries I saw in referral data. But Google at best only drives about 20% of this blog’s traffic. That’s about the same percentage as Xenite.Org gets.

I can live with or without Google. You need to get your Web sites to the point where you can live with or without Google, too. That’s the surest sign of trust and authority that I can think of.