Domain Trust

Domain Trust can be described as a search engine's "secret credit score" for your website. Just like a real credit score, there are a variety of factors involved, and they are subject to change based on market circumstances. Another similarity is that a complex algorithm is used to determine your credit score, in the same way that the domain trust algorithm is used to determine where you’ll find yourself in the search engine listings. It should be noted that there is a difference between “domain trust,” which has several factors we’ll discuss below, and “page trust” which has to do with how a site’s content presents itself.

Domain trust isn’t the only factor in good rankings. A trusted site is no good for search engines if it is hard to read, classify, or compare to similar websites. A perfect site with few external links is going to have a hard time getting found for any terms that make money for webmasters. Having good domain trust goes a long way toward getting search engine rankings quickly, and keeping them over the long term, so it is important for anyone interested in SEO to understand the factors involved.

Generally, domain trust is based around the factors below:

• Domain age (physical and cached) – A site doesn’t have to be too old to get good search engine rankings, but we have found that older sites tend to get better results faster when they make changes. This could be because spammers tend to acquire lots of brand new domains and try to rank them, so a preference for established sites will cut out quite a few bad eggs. This does not appear to be as big of a factor as it was in the past, but it is worth noting. To get an idea of when the site may have been cached by search engines, Archive.org can show the earliest date for content on your site. Note that a domain that expired and was purchased again should be considered to have started on the domain’s registration date in WHOIS.
• Domain expiration date – If the domain is less than a year old, and expires on its first birthday, it may be questionable. Note that registering a domain for 5 years does not guarantee better rankings, but there is some thought in the SEO industry that short registration times indicate that you don’t think your website is worth $7/year to maintain, so the search engines may not value it that much either. Since a lot of spammers and domain tasters go with the absolute minimum registration period, there is some merit to the idea that a 2-year registration sets you apart from the bad guys.
• Links to Domain – The quality and quantity of inbound links to your website is probably a bigger topic of discussion in the SEO world than the quality of your website itself. Links coming to your site should come from trustworthy sites. They should be coming to your homepage and to interior pages. They should come from a diverse set of sites, but ideally from relevant diverse sites. The value of the referring site is important. If the New York Times gives one link to your site, you may get more trust than 1000 links from a bunch of unknown bloggers. The old adage “lie down with dogs, wake up with fleas” is applicable in the world of linking.
• Links from Domain – Where do your links go? Remember that links are endorsements, and they say a lot about the endorser. Getting back to the “credit score” analogy, linking to questionable sites is as smart as co-signing a credit card application for everyone at the local halfway house. If you link to adult, online pharmacy, and gambling sites, then the search engine is going to associate your site with them and their level of trustworthiness. While some sites in this field may be trustworthy from a search engine standpoint, you are unlikely to get good rankings in the “family friendly” results. In the same way, you can lose trust by participating in link exchanges, web rings, and other link swapping ventures, even if all the sites are PG-rated. When choosing to add a link to another site, you would do well to check its PageRank, content quality, and its other link partners.
• Interior (on-site) links – A good navigation structure on your site will help pass link authority from your interior pages back to the home page and vice versa. In this case, using good Page Trust tactics will improve domain trust at the same time.
• Who Owns the Site – Search engines don’t discriminate on a name-by-name basis, but they do take note if you own a lot of other domain names that have already been penalized. Many of the bigger spammers may own hundreds or thousands of other sites, and they follow the same pattern with all of them. It may be in a search engine’s best interest to pull domain trust from all sites owned by a single party, since it is a fast way to show relevant results via the trusted sites that remain. If you’ve only got a few sites, and none of them are banned, you probably don’t have to worry. There is a school of thought that you may have a hard time ranking different sites with nearly identical topics, so it is best to pick a “favorite” site that you want to rank.
• Other sites on IP address – There is a certain level of debate about this factor. If a high number of sites on a certain IP range (or “C block”) are very similar or have a bad history, then the search engines would have a reason to look at all of them with some suspicion. Unfortunately, some fields like real estate might all be going through a half dozen template builders who can integrate MLS functionality, so they are all in the same batch of IP addresses. Some of these agencies have run into trouble for SEO violations, and sometimes a whole set of sites can get banned for linking to each other. If you suspect this is a problem, buying a dedicated IP address for your site usually only costs a few dollars per month.
• Past History – You may have bought a domain name that is already in the doghouse. Google Webmaster Tools can usually tell you if this is the case. If you really want to check for big problems before purchasing a domain, you may even want to ask to get added (by way of your own metatag) to the site’s Webmaster Tools profile. If there is a message saying that your site is not part of Google’s results, then you may have problems. If you already own a domain with this kind of message, then you can file a reinclusion request, and you should explain that you just bought the domain. Once again, there is some speculation that search engines like Google keep a permanent history on domain penalties, and it may affect future rankings.

As with everything else in the field of Search Engine Optimization, some of these factors are subject to debate. Many people in SEO will tell you that domain age is not important anymore, or that the future expiration date of a site is no longer a factor. Nonetheless, if you are assuming that the site is going to be around for five years, you might as well lock in the registration for that time period. Every once in a while companies lose their domain names because they didn’t renew them, and then they drop their SEO project because it has become unnecessary. In this case checking out the domain expiration date would have been a great piece of advice, even if it was only from the perspective of maintaining lifetime customer value.

What can you do to improve domain trust? First, make sure you get links from trustworthy sources. Make sure your site navigation helps search engines pass link authority to the top pages on the site, and back to the homepage. Clean up any questionable past linking practices. To show that you’re part of the internet, you can link out to a few trusted pages on sites like Wikipedia or a good source of online information. If you sell anything, ask your vendors and wholesalers to link to you. You can also work to become an authority in your field by making the website a source for information that people want to read, or have tools that people keep coming back to use. Building trust takes a bit of time, but it also pays of in the form of better search engine positions. Normally when you improve your domain trust you are also adding usability and features that make your site a better place to visit, and this in turn leads to owning the profitable website that you originally intended to have.

Note: Web.com Search Agency has a Domain Trust Tool that can show you how well your site stacks up to top sites in Google. It also gives you a rough indicator of what you’ll need in order to get the same results.