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05.05.09 Gaining Website Trust Through Link Building  By Eric EngeOne of the things that is evolving in my philosophy of SEO is how I look at the role of trust. Trust was not something that was important during AltaVista's hey day, when keyword density was king, or even during the early days of Google when PageRank in its purest form ruled the day. Another big thing in my mind these days is that the number of factors, and the importance of each factor, involved in ranking algorithms has changed. When the PageRank paper was published, you pretty much had a blueprint for how it all worked. However, knowledge is power, and in this case the power was in the hands of the spammers. As a result of these factors, numerous patents have been published by each major search engine, on a variety of topics related to ranking, yet these patents no longer provide a clear roadmap to ranking algorithms. They provide hints as to what the search engines could choose to use a ranking signals, but they don't tell us what they do use. For this we have to rely on intuition, judgment, and testing. In evaluating ranking signals I believe there are two major factors:
• Noisiness of the signal. Does a strong positive always, or nearly always, mean a good, relevant site? Does a strong negative always, or nearly always, mean a poor, or less relevant site? • Importance of the signal. Assuming that we have a signal that is not noisy, how significant an indicator is it when compared to other signals? What made links such a powerful element is that they were, and still are, a powerful indicator of relevance and quality. One example of a noisy signal is Bounce Rate. In principle, the idea is that when a user goes to a site, and returns to the SERPS after a relatively short period of time, that this is an indicator that the result was not a good one. But the problem with it is that on a reference search (e.g. zip code for Charlotte) the user may have gotten what they want in just a few seconds.
One of the signals that I think has low noisiness and a high degree of importance is trust. One important paper on this topic was published in 2004 by Yahoo! and Stanford University. The paper was titled Combatting WebSpam with TrustRank. The paper proposes that the search engines use human editors to identify a site of highly trusted seed pages. Then, "once we manually identify the reputable seed pages, we use the link structure of the web to discover other pages that are likely to be good". The general notion is that the closer a web page is to a highly trusted page (closer as mentioned in number of link hops) the most likely it is to be a trustworthy page. You can think of a Trust Rank factor that reduces the overall trust level of a page based on the number of hops from the human reviewed seed sites. The paper also suggests that links placed on pages with lots of links (even if they are on one of the human selected seed pages) tend to be placed with less care than links on pages with very few links. As a result the trust communicated by two selected seed pages can differ. Continue reading this article. About the Author: Eric Enge has established a reputation as a leading search engine marketing expert, and is the author of the Ramblings about SEO blog. Eric is also co-founder of Moving Traffic, Inc., the publisher of City Town Info and Custom Search Guide. |
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