Hi everyone,

Today I am going to dwell on the role of trust and the way search engines perceive it in the light of link building. Trust is a much bandied word in the search engine industry and it directly relates to the trust acquired by a domain.

When a site is penalised, one of the most important things to check is if the site is still in good neighbourhood. In other words, the links pointing from the site to questionable areas (read untrustworthy sites) on the web can be a reason. This is strikingly similar to the societal analogy – You are judged by the company you keep.

Search engines are filing new patents continuously and are introducing new factors in their ranking algorithm that determine your site’s position in the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). The strength of these signals plays a major role in determining a site’s ranking.

Unlike the days when keyword density ruled the roost and later Google’s PageRank algorithm became public knowledge, spammers exploited it to the hilt. This has led to search engines guarding their ranking algorithms and not being explicit in what signals count and what dont.

Eric Enge feels there are two major factors in evaluating ranking signals.

• Noisiness of the signal: Does a strong positive signal always or nearly always mean good relevant site? Does a strong negative signal always or nearly always mean a poor irrelevant site?
• Importance of the signal: Assuming a signal is not noisy, how significant is its impact when compared to other signals?

Links have been and currently are a singular source of powerful signal for relevance and quality. This is one major factor that still ranks way above other factors.

A good example of a noisy signal is the bounce rate. In simple words, this measures the amount of time  spent by a user on a site from the moment she clicks on a result in the SERPs and lands on the site till the time she returns to the SERPs. The shorter the time span, the higher the bounce rate.

This can mean two things. One the content on the site is not relevant to what the searcher was looking for. The other scenario is the user has found what she was looking for and returned to the SERPs to do another search for something else.

Trust is a signal that has a low noise and is highly positive. Eric supports this view with a paper published by Yahoo and Stanford University in 2004 titled  Combatting WebSpam With TrustRank.

This paper states that the search engines use human editors to identify a collection of highly trusted seed pages from which others use the link structure of the web to identify other likely “good pages”.

If we compute the number of clicks from a trusted seed page to a new site as linkhops, then the shorter the distance a new site is identified from a trusted seed page site, it is perceived to be more trustworthy. Trust Rank factor is a positive signal that has gained lot of strength in ranking algorithm in its current phase.

Consider a highly trusted site like nzherald.co.nz  If your site is four linkhops away from a seed page on the nzherald site, a trust damping factor arises due to the trust rank of the web pages in the four intervening levels that separate your site from the authority site.

You have to consider the notion of Reverse Trust Rank whereby if your site links to spammy sites (bad neighbourhood), then this would reduce the trust rank of your site.

It is always wise for you to keep checking on your backlink strategy all the time. This is because  you may have a link to a good site today. Like everything transient in life, this good site you are linking to today can be acquired by a new owner over the next year and the new owner can end up trashing that site by pointing to spammy sites.

This means your site could be linking to a spammy site and end up getting penalised with loss of trust rank .  Is it worth getting penalised for no fault of yours? No, certainly not.

In conclusion, it is handy to have atleast a good idea of what factors the search engines consider in their ranking algorithm. This is a good foundation to base your site upon. As always, fresh updated content on the site will also go a long way in earning great editorial links and your site will be buoyant as ever on the SERPs.

Netconcepts is a well established reliable Auckland search engine optimisation firm with a great track record of quality search marketing services that have promoted their clients in diverse fields of New Zealand indutry to top rankings in the major search engines.