For my Challenge sites this year, I have successfully made four micro niche sites rank in the top three slots (page 1) in Google. With various WordPress pugins, and a nice SEO friendly theme, it is pretty easy to do the on-page SEO. The rest of the job is up to the back links. But what about the other factors? Scott Willoughby from SEOMoz has provided the following information on Trust and Authority.

What are the current Google Search Engine Ranking Factors?

algo elements Google Ranking Everything You Need to Know About Trust and Authority

Graphics from SEOMoz

  • 24% Trust and Authority of the Host Domain
  • 22% Link Popularity (mozRank) of the Specific URL
  • 20% The anchor text of the external links
  • 15% Keyword density for theme or category keyword
  • 7% Traffic and Click-Through Data
  • 6% Social Graph Metrics
  • 5% Registration and Hosting Data

Note a wapping 24% is related to the trust and authority of the host domain. What exactly does this mean? It’s related to the links right, meaning 66% of the Google ranking factors are link related. Lets look at this in more detail.

The importance of Trust and Authority was increased in the Mayday Update / Caffeine Update this year.

Trust and Authority of the Host Domain
 This factor is where Google tries to establish both the Trust and the Authority of your site. Google is trying to work out whether your site is spammy, connected to spammers, or is artificially promoted to a higher level of relevance. Conversely Google is trying to ascertain whether your site is an entirely “natural” site.

This can have a massive impact on the ranking of sites, especially for brands, Fortune 500 companies etc.  Google tries to establish both Trust and Authority to decide how strictly it will look at your site. Trust is basically whether you are spammy or not. Is your site connected to good neighborhoods or bad ones? What does your linking structure look like? Is it natural or faked?

Along with Trust goes Authority. Google tries to establish how authoritative your site is. Does your site have lots of good content, or do particular pages stand out (like a sore thumb)? Again looking at the linking strategy do links come from a variety of  domains or are the links heavily skewed (for example to particular forums)?

Trust

Who links to you
Google looks at how many hops you are away from an Authority site. If you are one domain hop away from an Authority site, such as the BBC or New York Times, then that’s great. As the Authority site has no spammers, your site one hop away is likely to have no spammers. This then degrades as you get further and further away from an Authority site.

Who do you link to
How good are your outbound links? Google says,  if you link to a spam site, then you are more likely to be spammer yourself. Conversely if you link to good neighborhoods, then you are more likely to be trust worthy yourself.

Registration Info
Google can see all domain registration information and in particular the number of domains in the domain owner network. Are a lot of these domains spam? If so then the assumption is that all domains in the network are spam. Many people believe that the Google sandbox may be related to this.

User Data Signals
Essentially Google spy data gathered from Google toolbar and other behavioral trackers, indicates whether the domain is being used in a natural way. If Google sees natural traffic behaving in a natural way, then it establishes some degree of trust. if it sees big spikes and unnatural behavior, then the site can be flagged.

Authority

How popular is the site and how is the content is treated
Google looks at the content overall and tries to determine if you have a number of pages of good content. Do you have a variety of links from some good blogs, to a number of different pages of content, or are they all pointing to one place (a link magnet perhaps).

This explains why sites such as Wikipedia get much more authority than anyone else. As soon as a Wikipedian puts up some information, it is quickly assumed to have authority and may rank much better than your page with high page rank, lots of back links, on-page optimisation etc.

Link Juice and Page Rank
This looks at where the page rank link juice is flowing. Rather than looking at individual pages (PR), this looks at entire domains and asks how do domains link to each other.  What exactly is the domain to domain linking network?

Diversity of Links
If a site is naturally linked then Google will find a diverse set of pages with a whole host of different kinds of links pointing to them. Google expects to find a mixture of follow and no-follow links. Spammers trying to raise their PR used to be able to find a handful of high do-follow PR links (perhaps from edu or gov sites) and quickly get a page to rank that way.

Google spots this as unnatural behaviour.  If a site doesn’t have a mix of low quality PR 0 links, a mix of follow and no follow links, and a diverse set of sources you may be in trouble.

Temporal Link Analysis
Google finally looks at how your links have evolved over time. The way that people are linking to your site must look like they were acquired naturally. Big spikes in linking may be due to some newsworthy item (on Digg), or they may be doe to some spamming activity going on with blogs and forums.

Google tries to work out which. If Google detects that some of the pages are really popular but most aren’t, then the site is not going to receive high Authority. If lots of people linking to lots of pages then this implies the rest of content is probably interesting and therefore authoritative.

Watch This Video

In the video below SEOMoz look at issues like inbound and outbound link patterns, registration history, temporal link patterns, and other aspects that can and will affect your domain’s trust metrics and its ability to both rank and pass value.

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday – Domain Trust & Authority from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

Reputable SEO Internet Market trainers like Ed Dale and Bob Somerfield focus heavily on market leadership. Conducting market leadership naturally lends itself to building up both Trust and Authority, not only with customers but with Google too.