12 Easy Quality Indicators to Combine to Prove Trust

There are several quick easy ways to establish some trust for your domain. There are really no excuses to not have most of this stuff for any legitimate business website. It’s so easy and the opportunity cost is extremely low compared to the potential benefits. Read: Yes, this is speculative – but it’s also relatively easy, shouldn’t take you long, and MOST LIKELY will combine for better results. You can probably argue each one of these – but why bother when you could be out working on more sites to test it on?

1. Privacy Policy
2. Contact page with physical address and phone number
3. Submit to local listings (assists with above)
4. Extended period domain registration
5. Get a half dozen trusted links (if I told you they’d no longer be trusted)
6. Legit WHOIS data that matches other records
7. Dedicated IP* – recently mentioned by Jim.
8. Adding a FEW trusted outbound authority links – wikipedia, industry associations, etc.
9. Valid code (or close to anyhow) – you can argue this all day, but on a massive scale better code = higher quality
10. Fast server response time*
11. No 404′s
12. Extremely limited downtime*

*If you can afford more for a better host, you’re more likely to be in it for the long run, and likely to be of higher quality. Don’t believe me? Would you be more trusting buying a car from someone with three cars on the side of the road, or a dealership that had been in business 20 years and had a nice location? Why do you think big banks are located in high rent downtown districts and have marble floors?

Pay attention to what is credible to both users AND someone with a search relevance quality mindset. Everyone says optimize for users – try optimizing your site for to convince a savvy threadwatch readin’, affiliate site buildin’ fickle user that you are credible, and it will probably help your SEO efforts these days.

These are the easy ways – you have to work them together and THINK about what would indicate quality on a mass level. Seriously folks, quality indicators = trust. It’s not about keyword stuffing and link bombing anymore…SEO is about proving you’re trustworthy – it makes it even easier when you actually ARE – but even if you ARE – you have to know how to SHOW that you are. Let the damn dog sniff your hand!

Inspired by Michael’s recent post on Google using WHOIS data.
From GrayWolf:
So how would one go about providing that strong indication of quality in the absence of actual quality?

Yes. Sometimes you gotta fake the funk when you’re an affiliate. That’s why affiliates know how to display and identify ACTUAL trust when it’s present. That’s also why affiliate types are fickle shoppers and know how to look for credibility on a website (kinda like evaluating reviews and ratings on ebay). SE’s don’t hate affiliates – they hate low quality, non-trustworthy sites. They’re just gonna “play the odds” with indicators of quality.

Trust is a big piece of the equation right now. There’s too many GOOD sites for engines to worry too much about collateral damage. If you don’t know how to PROVE you’re trustworthy, then you definitely won’t be.

More reading

• Andy on quality indicators
• G-dub on the infamous google patent