GPWA Times Magazine - Issue 31 - February 2015

100bestonlinecasinos.com It’s been ranking since at least May 2013. There are only 28 referring domains and 60 percent of links are nofollow. Their USP? One hundred top casinos. Let’s “unpack” trust . . . We have known about trust and Google since 2006. While trust is an accepted idea, proving it has been difficult because it's been hard to pull together the right data across a large enough number of sites to get any meaningful statistical correlations. Fortunately there are tools like SEMrush and Majestic which can give us great in- sights into domains. Majestic is extremely good on links data, showing you more backlink data than anyone else. SEMrush tracks 106 million key phrases and the rankings for 100 million domains across 26 country territories. We have developed an Excel-based tool called SEO DataGrabber which allows us to query thousands of domains and run the data through Excel to look for correla- tions and ultimately answers to important questions, such as: Do trusted sites ex- ist? Who are they? What can we do with this information? One of my biggest questions has been why some sites rank really well on very few links and others have to shovel links in to get any movement at all. After a lot of research and data analysis, I've concluded there are four categories of sites when it comes to links and rankings: 1. A normal website. It needs X links, of Y quality, to rank at Z level 2. A trusted website which needs X links, of Y quality, to rank really, really well 3. Spam sites which have large numbers of links that rank for only a short time because they get penalized 4. Sites working with redirects which might appear to be trusted but in fact are just spamming (kudos to www.irishwonder.com for identifying and writing about this) Let’s go through trusted sites in more de- tail so we can see how our three specimen sites match up. The main concepts Google wants to trust certain websites be- cause overall this produces better-quality search results. Google wants you — if its users want you in Google’s search re- sults. In my opinion that's why operators tend to do better per referring domain than affiliates. People try to oversimplify the idea of “trust,” so let’s dig into it some more. Trust rank debunked One of the great urban myths in SEO is trust rank. There is no such thing, unfortunately. "It's not that we have something specifi- cally called trust rank," said Matt Cutts, who leads Google's web spam team. "Google has a trust factor, but it is made of several ranking algorithm factors, which may be referred to as 'trust.'" So what factors influence trust? Google is getting so sophisticated that gaming the algorithm is getting harder and harder. In my opinion it’s better to follow certain methodologies, which cre- ates a footprint Google likes. Trust signals The main concern here is whether a site has a good user experience. Once again, if you are a site Google's users want to see, Google wants you in their search results. And as luckwould have it, Google gives us an instruction manual in their 2014 quali- ty rater guidelines (Thanks, Google!), and understanding this document is a great way to refocus your affiliate mindset. Quality rating guidelines One of the misconceptions around qual- ity rater guidelines is that their ratings di- rectly affect a site’s rankings. Ratings are a calibration process for the algorithm. In other words, sites reviewers trust have a certain footprint and the algo- rithm looks for that footprint and there- fore gives a site trusted status. COVER STORY Majestic Metrics: TrustFlow: 14 | Citation Flow 38 | External Backlinks 70 Referring Domains 29 | Referring IPs 29 | Referring Subnets 27 100bestonlinecasinos.com Trust and trust optimization: The new SEO discipline