Domain Trust

peter_d · 06-26-2007, 01:49 AM

I know John has been banging on about this for years. Forget PR, think domain trust.

http://www.scoreboard-media.com/ranking-for-everything/

Quote:

I still think in the balance of domain trust vs. SERPs chasing, the affiliate folks should lean a little closer to the known high converting SERPs due to the nature of that game. But for the definitive online audience builder, the smartest thing you can do is to (and here comes the obligatory sports analogy) stop trying to drive the green and start thinking your way around the course via signals of domain trust

Jesse Vlasveld · 06-26-2007, 02:22 AM

Well written article, didn't even get bored over that wall of text!

He states some good points too.

Comenius · 06-26-2007, 04:01 PM

All very good points, but I struggle to understand how you quantify trust in a way to show how you are doing vs. others, to what extent you are or are not improving, etc.

Any ideas on that score?

I believe one of the reasons why PR has such staying power is that it is intuitively easy to understand it. It's obvious that a 5 is better than a 4, and not as good as a 6.

While trust may be more meaningful, it seems like it's hard to make it actionable.

Cornbread · 06-26-2007, 05:28 PM

So how do you build trust into your site?

peter_d · 06-26-2007, 07:55 PM

One way is to isolate the criteria Google uses in order to trust a domain. Factors like domain age, usage stats, linking from authority domains, etc.

That can be hard to do.

I think a better approach, for most webmasters, is figure out the things that make *you* trust a site - and emulate those. Do you trust sites that don't appear to have other visitors? That don't update? That you haven't heard of before? A site that hasn't been recommended? A site launched last week?

Trust relationships, both offline and on, probably look pretty similar.