Online trust affects the rank of a website on search engines and result pages. Considering how important this is to a website, it is surprising that many website owners know next to nothing about trust and how it works online. Even those who know about it also usually don’t know how to increase the trust factor of their website to help their SEO rank. Thankfully for you, you’re at the right place to find out.
Trust significantly affects the search rankings of websites. It is also one of the random factors that search engines use for websites. In this article, we will explain what trust is, Google trust rank, and how to use it to increase your website’s SEO ranking.
An excellent place to start is to understand what online search trust is. When we mention trust, it has to do with the authority and credence that defines a website’s reputation. This is what search engines check when rather the reliability and trustworthiness of a website. This is because search engines are designed to serve the searchers and want to show them the very best results.
Google TrustRank: what is it?
Webspam is something that Google is trying to combat, and they do this through TrustRank.
There are such things called “trust signals”, which Google measures with TrustRank. These signals are what they use to evaluate if other essential ranking signals such as content quality and links are legitimate.
Although it was the search engine Yahoo! that first created TrustRank, it is now common for search engines to provide search results based on the measure of trust it has in websites. Google also confirmed that their algorithm uses it for ranking websites. This means that a website that Google trusts will rank high in its results. TrustRank determines the measure of trust that Google has in a website.
Google TrustRank: how it works
The TrustRank algorithm works to separate web pages useful from the spammy ones by measuring some indicators. Even though there is no particular metric for measuring TrustRank, you can at least know how it works.
Google measures a website’s trustworthiness by calculating how far the website or page is from another one considered the “seed site.” This seed site is another website that Google considers to be wholly trustworthy and authoritative. Most niches have their seed sites. Although it is hard to tell which websites are the seed sites, you can hypothetically consider websites such as the BBC, CNN, Wikipedia, Harvard University, etc.
The image below shows how the TrustRank works.
Simply put, it’s just a separation degree. This means that if website A is directly linked to a seed site, that’s ideal as it’s just one link. If the seed site links to another website B that is then linked to the first website A, it’s still an ideal situation, but it is not as strong as the initial one.
The way it is summarized in college essay papers, if a website is linked closely to a seed site, it will likely have a high TrustRank.
So TrustRank is not about the number of links on a website or page. What it measures is how trustworthy the links are. So, the higher the quality of the sites linking, the more the trust. If you are getting links from a website with high trust, you already have a strong endorsement of trust.
How to maximize the TrustRank of your website
When it comes to maximizing your website’s TrustRank, there are several elements that you would need to have on your website.
Links
- Quality of your backlinks: To maximize your TrustRank, you need to get strong and high-quality links from sites that are considered to be authority websites. Google considers these websites to be third-party votes which they trust and gives the thumbs up to. However, if you are getting links from low-grade websites, Google would think your website is sleazy as well. Get links from authoritative and high-quality websites, .gov sites, .edu sites within your industry. These websites are considered very respectable as well.
- Backlinks: Apart from getting authoritative websites in your industry, you can also get other quality sites to link to your site as well. The more of these links that you get, the more Google thinks that you are famous. This sort of “popularity” will make you Google to see you as a trusted website.
- PageRank of sites linking to you: again, this has to do with the websites that link to you and get high-quality websites over websites that are rated lowly. If websites are going to be linking to you, make sure that you check the website’s PageRank. This is because Google TrustRank depends on PageRank directly.
Time on page and bounce rate
The bounce rate of a website is the metric measuring the percentage of traffic you get on your website page and exit the page without checking out on other pages on the website.
Time on-page is the average time that users spend on your website page.
If your website visitors like your website’s content, they are likely to take their time to browse through your website. According to content creators at best essay writing services, for Google to consider your website as trustworthy, your website bounce rate must be low, and your time on the page must be high.
If you are looking to increase your website’s time on page for a minimal bounce rate, the following tips are essential to implement.
- Optimize your website speed so that it loads faster. The faster your website loads, the more people will likely wait on it and go through other pages. On the other hand, if it loads slowly, they are likely to quit it or lose interest in checking other pages.
- Make it easy to navigate. If website visitors can’t find their way around your website, they will find their way out of it.
- Optimize your website for mobile devices: more people are surfing the internet with their mobile devices now than ever, and fewer people on desktops. Making your site mobile responsive makes it easier to load and navigate for them.
- Make your content readable: internet users don’t have much time to try and figure out your site’s content. Make it easy to read and understand or watch them bounce off it.
- Include sources and references on your content: if you are able to show that your content is accurate and well researched, you will have more readers stay on your site and always come back for more.
- Include visual: the use of relevant images on your content makes it more engaging and interactive for the readers, so they are likely to stay. It’s not enough to have good content if it feels too wordy and clogged up. It makes it boring.
Conclusion
Google TrustRank is a vital SEO criterion, so if you’re serious about your website ranking well on Google, you should start paying attention to how you can win over Google’s trust for your website.
This article already explains what Google TrustRank is, how it works, and some ways that you can use it for your website. You are sure to find these tips helpful.
