Understanding Domain Trust and Authority

Domain trust and authority are essential to ranking highly in the Google SERPS not only for our highly linked to home pages but also for brand new pages. You may publish a new piece of highly targeted content but if your domain has little trust or authority the chances of it ranking highly anytime soon are slim and none.

If you want new pieces of content to rank highly on Google you must continually build domain trust and authority, not sure what domain trust and authority is? Ok let’s explain it in a simple, practical way;

Domain Trust

Improving domain trust is showing Google and the other search engines that we are a site ready to provide real value to the index and that were not going to engage in unethical techniques. So what factors are considered? Well hundreds probably but let me spend a few minutes on the main ones;

Where Are Your Links From

When assessing the domain authority of a site the first place Google will look to is “who links to you?”. The idea here is that if most of your links come from spammy domains, you may be considered a spammer. This sort of backs up the “google bowling theory” published earlier this week, in that a competitor can spam your site in order to push you out of the index, however it’s not as simple as that.

If Google see’s your site has links from trusted domains such as wikipedia, dmoz, yahoo directory or other highly trusted editorial sites your site is more likely to be trusted. If some one then comes along and spams your site, you’re less likely to feel the impact.

If you have very few links and your site is new and then all of a sudden acquires thousands of spammy links, you could be in trouble. In the early days of your site focus on acquiring trusted links that build up your resistance to future attacks.

Who Do You Give Links To

If you link to spammy sites, this will have a big impact on the amount of trust you receive. The impact will be harsher than having spam in links due to the fact you control your site and who you link to. The theory is that spammers link to spammers, therefore stay way from it. If you want to publish a post outing a spam site use the nofollow to protect your trust.

Registration Details

This is still a debatable area but many believe Google became a registrar of domains for a reason.

A) They can see how many domains you control

B) Can quickly assess links between domain registration details

If SEOwizz also had 200 domains registered on the same account or the same contact details were used to register domains on multiple accounts, Google now has a partial way of picking up on this. If 90% of the domains are static or have been flagged as spam, you may struggle getting you clean domain into the index and may have to go through the dreaded sandbox.

The best thing you can do to retain trust is to keep everything as clean as possible.

Domain Authority

Domain authority is a more straight forward concept; how many quality pages link to your domain and how do they link to your domain?

PageRank / Link Juice

Google’s original patent for PageRank only took individual pages into account. Therefore each page was given an authority individually, however even though this may be the case there are many, including myself, in the SEO industry who feel Google also make this calculation on a domain basis.

So were not just talking about how many links a particular page of your site gets but how many links your domain receives as a whole. Obviously different links carry a different amount of link juice, this is why it is preferable to get links from pages with very few outbound links on them, the less links the more juice to pass.

Domain diversity

Not only will Google look at how many links your domain has acquired but it will also take into account the diversity of the links you have acquired. If you have 1000 links from 10 different domains, this is not going to be as effective as having 1000 links from 100 different domains.

Getting a diverse link profile is more difficult than simply getting links from the same domain, you should try to strike a healthy balance between quantity and diversity.

Deep Links

I have published an article about building links to deep pages but why is it important?

Remember we are talking about domain trust here and not page trust. If all your links go to one page of your site Google and other search engines have no reason to take any notice of the rest of the content, if no one wants to link to it, why should they bother looking at it.

Building links to deep pages will allow each page to hold trust, this trust works collectively to increase domain authority.

Don’t forget, building domain authority will allow you to rank higher and publish new pages without having to jump through as many Google hoops.

Hope this was helpful.

Tim

Tagged as: Domain Authority, Link Juice, Pager Trust, pagerank