Google Trust and Reputation Factors – Part 1

Google trust and reputation is talked about as having profound effects on whether or not your business website shows up in the search engines.

Some of the major factors that go into whether Google trusts your site are listed below. The topics were given by Matt Cutts – Google employee and search engine spokesman. My comments follow.

To increase your business website’s reputation in Google Matt Cutts recommends:

Be interesting– If your website is a clone of another site – different wording but all saying the same thing – this is not adding anything to the webosphere and is not likely to make it’s mark in the Google results. Also, use multimedia and different means to communicate your message than do other sites. Add PDF files, XLS, presentations, graphics, video, audio, whatever you can to spice it up and make it sticky for visitors that arrive on your site. The bounce rate on your site should be as low as possible – which means visitors stay once they arrive at your site.

Update often– Continually add content to your site on a recurring basis. It need not be scheduled, but regular updates are highly recommended. News sites rank highly in Google probably because their depth of information and the fact that they’re updated many times throughout the day. Google would love to have real-time search at some point. The more real-time you can make your site – the better off you’ll be as time goes forward.

Find your niche - Focus your site on a tightly defined niche and Google will know what to do with your site. If you consistently write about the same niche and cover different areas Google sees that as a quality site that is adding something ot their index. Off topic posts are probably not helping at all – so keep them to a minimum. There are plenty of unexploited niches out there – find one in your industry and exploit it to your advantage.

Provide a useful service – Are you providing what 75,000 others are already doing? Google is not likely to index your site very highly in this case unless you become one of the best 75,000. How hard would that be? Almost impossible, but $ solves everything, right? This parallels the idea about finding your niche. Do a value add to a traditional service or product to make it more useful than what thousands of companies already have.

“Useful” might also relate to how often your links are passed around the web. Viral content or flagship content will do best.