SEO / SEM Blog by Search Circus

Even Google’s co-founder Larry Page’s now famous patent for the Google search engine, he mentioned that Google will rank a Webpage’s “trust” and its “authority.” But what does that mean? How are trust and authority different? How can understanding them help you optimize Website traffic? A recent thread on Webmaster World sought to explain the differences between these two qualifications. Here’s a simplified version of what they came up with, and how knowing the difference can help you optimize Website traffic:

Trust: Google has a hand-selected seed list of trusted domains, which means these domains host Webpages that are what they say they are. In other words, they’re not spam sites. And from Google’s perspective, the Webpages on these domains are well-coded. The second-tiered level of trusted domains is Webpages that closely resemble the original, seeded Webpages. These are deemed highly-trusted Webpages. Any domain that hosts pages that resemble these highly-trusted domains will have high trust ranking.

So how does this help you optimize Website traffic? The short answer is that it doesn’t. But trust is still very important. If your domain is deemed “trusted,” then you’ll be protected from Google-bowling, a particularly nasty form of online sabotage where a competitor or misanthrope floods your domain with page requests, thereby fooling Google into thinking you’re manipulating your own site for inflated popularity. So trust works as a kind of credit against attackers, something that should be important to all seeking to optimize Website traffic.

Next, we have Authority: Authority is determined by the quality of your inbound external links. That’s the simple definition. The real meat and bones methods of determining authority are—you guessed it—kept secret by Google. But, again, that hasn’t stopped many who want to optimize Website traffic from offering theories as to what’s important to a Webpage’s authority and what isn’t. Spend any amount of time on a search engine forum about how to optimize Website traffic and you’ll read hundreds of competing theories argued over, intense discussions of page-ranking minutiae, and other threads on how to earn authority and optimize Website traffic.

But we won’t get into all those here, we’ll just point out that whole trust really doesn’t matter in the whole Google rankings game; however, authority is key if you want to optimize Website traffic.

But despite their differences, many still conflate trust and authority. Hopefully, if nothing else, this little spiel demonstrates that they’re two separate entities in Google’s insanely complex algorithm.