April 14th, 2010 by Nick

Google’s ranking factors have changed a lot in recent years, and search engine optimization is no longer a simple task of creating as many links as you can. The number of sites in competition is larger than ever, and with so many of them using paid advertising alongside traditional SEO tools, even Google PageRank is losing its relevance.

While SEO link building is still an important aspect of search engine optimisation, it is online reputation management that is the keyphrase these days, in particular domain trust. Today, this is spoken in capital letters, the way PageRank is. It appears to be a Google concept and refers to the way in which Google trusts your domain.

In fact, this isn’t true. Unlike PageRank, Google hasn’t adopted the term for its own trademarked use; domain trust applies to all search engines and directories, not just Google. However, since Google controls 70% of all internet search traffic, it makes sense to concentrate on this area. But people are still confused about how a domain gains Google Trust. Is it that the site is trusted because it gets a lot of links, or because Google has evaluated it and found the site trustworthy?

Like most of what goes on in Google, no-one outside of the company really knows. However, a good search engine optimisation company will be able to make some pretty shrewd guesses on your behalf. Here’s some of the areas they may look at:

Your link profile i.e. the sites your own pages connect to. What is the proportion of good links to bad ones? In a PageRank relationship, the domain trust of other sites will be important.

Your domain age, i.e. the amount of time the domain has been live. All site owners know how long it takes to get websites to notice them. This isn’t just down to link building strategies. It takes time to gain trust. New sites have to earn this, which is why many SEO companies recommend PPC marketing with Adwords to begin with.

Link distribution on your site. Is the entire linking strategy targeted at the homepage, or are there deep links taking people direct to specific pages? Social media marketing, in which you embed deep links in social networking sites, should be part of your search engine optimisation plan anyway, but Google is now taking these into account when deciding site trustworthiness. Don’t neglect Wikipedia, SearchWiki will be an important Google Trust tool in the future.

Many of the more obvious criteria are things every search engine optimization company should know. Sites that regularly turn up in long-tail searches, for example, are perceived as being more trustworthy. This may seem a touch unfair, if your site has an effective internal search facility to save people this bother, but even with well-known sites like Amazon, people still tend to type site-plus-product into the Google box, rather than use the search box on the Amazon homepage. Contact information and worthy textual content also support domain trust.

Search engine optimisation starts with how your site is perceived by the search engines themselves.

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