Does Google Trust You?
May 26th, 2007 by 
Chris Pangburn
This article looks at the impact of a part of the Google algorithm called Google TrustRank, on the ranking of your site in their search engine. Although no-one except those high up in Google actually know the exact formula for their algorithm, there is generally a widespread consensus between search engine optimisation (SEO) professionals as to the existence of TrustRank, especially since it was registered as a Trademark by Google in 2006. So what is TrustRank and how can I develop it?
TrustRank comprises a variety of features which can contribute to your rankings in Google, and is aimed at removing spam sites from their listings, thus increasing the quality of the results they provide. They are just a selection of criteria which are used to automatically ‘judge’ your website, effectively calculating the authority and trustworthiness of your site. The other aspect of TrustRank is a manual editorial review by Google in determining what the characteristics of high quality sites in each topic are - other sites are then compared to the benchmark ’seed’ website. In my opinion the five most important criteria for which we can influence are as follows…
- Length of Domain Registration – With domain name extensions such as .com it is possible to register your domain for up to ten years. Doing so is likely to make your website look more trustworthy in the eyes of the search engines, as most spam sites are less likely to invest in their site. In other words, they know you’re serious.
- Privacy Policies & Contact Details – Whilst a legal requirement in some countries, displaying your contact details (which include a physical trading address, contact telephone number and email address) on your website will not only make your site visitors trust in you more, but Google can also detect these and it will make your website seem legitimate. Having a comprehensive privacy policy (call it privacy-policy.html or suchlike) can also provide a benefit. If you’re not sure where to start then you can download some free example privacy policies from here.
- Authority Of Inbound Links – Whilst the best link building strategy is to create useful and interesting content that people link to naturally, however for commercial sites this sometimes isn’t really an option. If you are proactively running a link building campaign, then try and get a variety of links from trusted sites. You can identify these by most websites with a domain name extention of .edu, .gov for example. Other good sites to get links from are ‘authority sites’ – these are considered like ‘hubs’ for certain topics, and the giveaway sign is if you type their name into Google, it displays a range of ‘sub-links’ underneath the main website listing.
- Outbound Linking Strategy – Matt Cutts, an employee of Google has specifically stated that you need to ensure that you don’t link to any ‘bad neighbourhoods’ from your website. Bad neighbourhoods can be spam sites, affiliate sites and any containing dubious content. Avoid linking to sites such as these, as they will definitely pull down your rankings.
- Link Age - It is much better to have long-term inbound links to your site, than an equal number of transient links. Google puts more weight onto links which have been established for a longer period of time.
In summary for Google to give you the maximum amount of trust, you should take care over your link strategy, and display your contact details and privacy policy on your website. Quite possibly you could already be doing this, but if not then they should help boost your rankings and Google TrustRank. This is just one aspect to successful search engine optimisation, we have a website promotion guide that contains a range of other SEO strategies.
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