Question: Why Do I Need Trust and Authority?

I used to rank really well in Google but over the past couple of years, my rankings have dropped significantly. Can’t I just join a link network to improve my rankings? Why do I need trust and authority?

Deeho Says:

Google is a constantly evolving organism. Nothing they do is set in stone or fixed. Consequently the metrics that Google use to position each site in SERPs is constantly being tweaked to improve the results.

Because of this, website owners need to stay abreast of the changes Google make and adapt their site, content and back-link structure to stay high up in the rankings.

A few years ago, what we now refer to as trust and authority was called page rank (PR) which was a 0 – 10 score assigned to each site (and indeed page of each site) depending on the PR of the pages and sites that linked to you.

This was quite basic in its implementation but worked well in providing an indicator of a sites value.

PR was quite easy to manipulate, for example, PR used to be assigned on a 6 monthly basis, and there was a time when it was common practice to buy a domain, redirect in to Google.com until Google reassigned PR on their 6 month cycle.

Once PR had been assigned, you could then take your domain, set up a website with it and for 6 months you would have a PR of 10/10…… of course this was only a short term cheat, but for churn and burn site builders it worked well for creating very powerful sites very quickly.

Google has moved on from those days and now uses a range on measures to decide how authoritative and trustworthy you are within your niche.

Without being trusted, Google won’t rank you very high. Authority is a measure of power and influence.

Google want to provide results that other people consider to be very useful, so the more of an authority you are considered to be, the higher you will rank.

There are no ways you can avoid building trust and authority if you want your share of Google traffic.

Additional Reading:

What is SEO?