GPWA Times Magazine - Issue 31 - February 2015

get twice the search value. This is an ex- ample of brute-force link building over a trusted domain. Obviously there are onsite optimization variables and small details hiding in the data, but the real question is, why should some sites take it all while everybody else has so little? I can only put it down to these select sites being trusted and thus getting a free pass to rank higher than “untrusted” sites on fewer links. How to identify these trusted sites If you're doing this on a budget the easiest way is to: • Identify a specimen website. • Go to SEMrush and look at the long- term rankings. If the site has been rank- ing for more than five months then it's probably going to stick around. • Go to Majestic and check the overall site metrics, looking for overall follow links, citation flow and trust flow. If the site has relatively few follow links and the quality spectrum is normal then it's a good signal. If you're taking this up a level, then set up accounts with SEMrush and Majestic so you can query large numbers of domains. Big or small, the process is the same; you're just looking for sustained rankings on very few referring domains. If a site has come through fairly recently and seems to have no referring domains to speak of, it's probably redirection spam. It used to be very easy for affiliates to game the system, catch as much traffic as they could and monetize. But things have changed. Final thoughts It's time to factor in trust optimization. Google is changing, we know that. Onsite optimization has grown progressively more nuanced. In the past it was about keyword density and keywords in title tags. Now it's about writing in a very con- sistent way around particular themes. I see trust optimization as another layer alongside onsite optimization and link acquisition. If you get your trust footprint right, your links will work better for you. Of course you don't have to do this. There are many websites which just ram in links and do get ranked; however, they stand out, get manually reviewed and get a penalty. It’s a simple formula, really: trust optimi- zation + onsite optimization + link acquisi- tion = rank sustainably and profitably. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Nick Garner is chief strategy officer and founder of 90 Digital. Before founding the agency, he was head of search for Unibet and before that search manager for Betfair. He is also an affiliate and has done his fair share of black hat SEO. Nick doesn't have a moral stance on SEO and just believes you do what it takes to rank sustainably. Bar Graph B Bar Graph C 47 Trust and trust optimization: The new SEO discipline