Domain Trust, Domain Authority

Rand Fishkin has written an excellent post about Google’s Ranking factors and how  their weighting has changed over the years. On-page factors have less to do with the ranking. Traditional methods of linking such as  creating as many links as possible have  lost much of their power. Although, I wonder whether this is an artificial just because competition means you have to create more links to compete.  Even the once mighty PageRank is having less of an impact.

While  most of the factors have decreased in relevance, the concept of domain trust is having a greater importance than ever. What do we mean by domain trust and how can you get Google to Trust your domain?

Domain Trust

Domain Trust is quite a nebulous concept. What does it mean? Google Trusts the information on a site because it is true? Or Google Trusts a site because lots of people visit it? Why is a domain trustworthy?

In the absence of any information we can only make assumptions about what might affect it. If you were making a decision about whether a site is a good site what factors could you look at to decide? These are just ideas; no one outside of Google really knows.

• Domain Age – it takes time to build trust and the past history of a domain may effect domain trust.
• Link Profile – essentially looking at the range of sites that you link to comparing the good links compared to the bad links.
• Domain Trust of other sites in a PageRank type relationship.
• User data from SearchWiki (not yet but maybe in the future)
• Social networking (not yet but maybe in the future)
• On page information such as stop words?
• Links from a white-list of sites which is periodically checked by hand for quality? A list of manually checked sites that are unlikely to become untrustworthy overnight, Wikipedia (this rules out being correct as a factor), BBC, CNN, etc.
• Contact information on a page.
• Rate of link growth, natural growth – number of links grows as  a function of time and the number of pages in a site. More content should mean more link growth.  Is there a natural rate of growth for links depending on site size?
• Duplicate Content – a site that steals content from another site would be more likely to be dodgy.
• Bounce Rate – noisy but could be a secondary factor. It has certainly been touted as a possible ranking factor for a long time. A good site would satisfy the needs of its users but this could still be acheived in one page-view.
• Link distribution – how are the links distributed on the  site. Are there any deep links or is the entire link structure concentrating on the home page?
• Long-tail rankings – sites that appear for many long tail search are more likely to have good content than simple web sites.

Building Trust Best Practice

What can you do to increase your domain trust?

• Don’t link to poor quality sites
• Create unique meaningful content.
• Build links from relevant pages with high authority. (In your own judgement).
• Create domain diversity. Obtain links from as many separate domains as possible and with a wide range of different types of site, niche directories, local, related sites.
• Create deep links to pages within your site.

What are your views on domain trust?