Page Trust

Similar to the concept of Domain Trust, the idea of Page Trust (or "on page trust factors") centers around a search engine’s rating of the type and kind of content on a website itself. There is a certain amount of controversy in the SEO community about whether and how an engine like Google would assign trust to a site. This idea is important in the “all other things being equal” category, since you don’t want a minor ranking factor to keep you from a better position, and you don’t want to be off the first page if a simple fix can get you there.

You can also get different definitions of Page Trust depending on who you ask, so we thought we’d share our idea behind the concept in this posting. Most of the time, the implementation of on-page trust factors should be second nature in the SEO process, and part of the site design advice given to customers. Here are a few items that consistently show up in conversations about Page Trust in the SEO world:

• Spiderability – Can Google, Bing, and Yahoo read the site? If they can’t read it, how can they trust it?


• Speed – How fast does the site load? If you go into Google analytics and compare bounce rate by connection speed, you might see why this is a good metric for search engines.


• Content – Is the content original? Is it useful? Is it stuffed with keywords? Was it written by a person or machine? Does it show up in a substantially similar or identical format on other pages? Does it match up with the title and the internal links pointing at it?


• Navigation – How do the pages relate to each other? Do they split up topics and categories in a way that gives more prominence to more important items? Is the navigation clean and easy to follow?


• Linking Structure – Do internal pages link back to the homepage? Is there a clear path that a user can follow around the site? Are there just enough, but not too many, internal links on most pages. (hint: more than 100 internal links on a non-sitemap page is probably too much.)


• Language – Does the language on the page match the language metatag. You don’t want to claim UK English on a US site, but you really don’t want to say it’s in French if it isn’t.


• Advertising – Are image or text link ads being sold on the page? This could significantly change how the trust of the page is being considered. Many sites that run ads use redirect links (where you link to another page on your own site that refreshes to the destination) for statistical purposes and to make sure they aren’t supplying a direct link. An obvious affiliate link from your page can sink it fairly fast, given the SEO abuses perpetrated by many affiliate sites.


• Grammar – What is the reading level on the page? Note that academic subjects may go for a higher level of grammar. In any case, semantic algorithms are going to have more and more influence on relevance in the future, so you want to ensure that usage, spelling, and natural language are being used.


• Address/Contact Page – Does your brick-and-mortar presence have a physical address? Addresses add confidence for search engines, especially if they match up with yellow and white page listings that have already been classified. Make sure you claim your Google Local listing and point it at your website.


• Categories – Good category structures help search engines understand the relevance of pages, how they relate to each other, and how they support the theme on the homepage.


• Privacy – A privacy policy is expected on a site, even if it collects no information of any kind. It should be on its own page.


• About – “About Us” pages can sometimes be seen as an artifact, but they’re an expected part of the architecture. Pure Speculation: if you were designing a search engine, you might want to get some information from the About Us page (who, what, why, where) so you could see what the site is about, knowing that most sites on the internet don’t actively try to SEO themselves.


• URLs – Clean, search engine friendly URLs with minimal tracking parameters (think ampersands and question marks) won’t make the search engine think that the page is temporary or used for paid traffic monitoring.


• W3C Validation – This is a tough one, since most sites aren’t W3C compliant, even though it may be a requirement in certain countries. Google doesn’t seem to care about compliance, and very big sites in the Google index won’t pass validation, but from a site trust standpoint you might consider being as compliant as possible. If you’re an SEO consulting firm doing work for a client, you can expect that another firm is going to come along at some point and ask your client about the number of W3C failures on the site.

One of the debatable factors in the realm of Page Trust is whether search engines use it on its own to determine the value of a site. Formulas like the Google Algorithm are secret, but it isn’t too much of a stretch to consider that search engines would give greater value to pages that show greater legitimacy. After all, Google and Yahoo were built by Stanford scientists, and the people at Bing are also pretty smart. If they want their academic colleagues (and everyone else) to endorse their engines, then they should be taking people to results that aren’t misspelled, poorly formatted, or downright questionable. Therefore, an algorithm for Page Trust would separate the wheat from the chaff fairly quickly. No matter whether Page Trust is a major or minor consideration, almost any well formatted website really should have these factors in play already, and the job of the SEO consultant should include pointing out a lack of Page Trust as a factor in low rankings.

As always, there should be some consideration to the idea that search engines rank web pages, not websites. However, search engines aren’t afraid to ban a whole website, so each page should be able to stand on its own in the trust department, but the site itself has to expand on that trust. From a purely on-page, non-domain related viewpoint, all the site pages have to be robust, spiderable, navigable, and “trustworthy.” Page Trust may be a single component of the SEO ecosystem, but it should be approached with the same care given to domain name selection and link building.