GPWA Times Magazine - Issue 31 - February 2015

Since Google spells out exactly what it looks for in a good site — i.e., an E-A-T (Expertise / Authoritativeness / Trustworthiness) site — it's worth taking a look at some excerpts from the quality rating guideline. From Google: "As long as the page is cre- ated to help users, we will not consider one particular purpose or type of page to be higher quality than another. For ex- ample, encyclopedia pages are not neces- sarily higher quality than humor pages." This means all things are relative: If you do trust optimization more than your peers do, you will be more trusted than they are. Reputation From Google: "Use reputation research to find out what real users, as well as ex- perts, think about a website. Look for re- views, references, recommendations by experts, news articles, and other credible information created/written by individu- als about the website." Sources of reputation information From Google: "Look for information writ- ten by a person, not statistics or other machine-compiled information. News ar- ticles, Wikipedia articles, blog posts, mag- azine articles, forum discussions, and rat- ings from independent organizations can all be sources of reputation information. Look for independent, credible sources of information." Obviously if you're a casino affiliate, it’s unlikely you'll get a Wikipedia page, but with your trust optimization hat on, you can add a “face” to the website, a real- looking address and some accountability with some third-party references saying you are real. Like I said before, you won’t be manually rated on site quality (unless it’s the web spam team); it’s the algorithm looking for this kind of stuff. We know that Google is getting very good at natural language processing, so it makes sense that Google can judge the sentiment behind a reference for your website. How to check your reputation, or your competitors’ reputation How about background checking your site? Using “mysite.com” as an example, try one or more of the following searches on Google: • [mysite –site:mysite.com]: A search for mysite which excludes pages on mysite.com • [“mysite.com” –site:mysite.com]: A search for “mysite.com” which excludes pages on mysite.com • [mysite reviews –site:mysite.com]: A search for reviews of mysite which excludes pages on mysite.com • [“mysite.com” reviews –site:mysite.com]: A search for reviews of “mysite.com” which excludes pages on mysite.com How does that footprint look? Is there room for improvement? Are there real people behind the site? From Google: Websites frequently include the following information: • About Us information • Contact or Customer Service information • Information about who is responsible for the content and maintenance of the website This is where simonsblogpark.com wins in my opinion. The site is all about Simon and his blog. It's the most unlikely of ranking sites for casino but when you check his site, he seems like a trustworthy person. To give this some contrast let's look at a checklist for giving the lowest ratings: As an affiliate how many of these apply to you? From Google: • True lack of purpose pages or websites • Deceptive pages or websites • Pages or websites which are created to make money with little to no attempt to help users • Pages on YMYL (your money or your life) websites with completely inadequate or no website information • Pages or websites created with no expertise or pages which are highly untrustworthy, unreliable, unauthoritative, inaccurate, or misleading • Websites which have extremely negative or malicious reputations • Harmful or malicious pages or websites • Pages with extremely low or lowest quality MC • Pages on abandoned, hacked, or defaced websites Many affiliate sites fall over when it comes to this checklist. Benefits of being trusted Unfortunately in affiliate marketing there are lots of losers, but if you want to be a winner, you will need to do a combina- tion of onsite optimization, trust optimi- zation and link acquisition. The payoff: • Ranking more easily per link you get • Easier link acquisition because people feel more comfortable linking to you • Greater spread of key phrases you will rank for • Better conversion rates • Ultimately better ROI 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.” 45 Trust and trust optimization: The new SEO discipline