Website Popularity, Relevance and Reputation
Website popularity, relevance and reputation are the main offsite factors search engines are trying to determine to assist how they rank your site for the keywords and phrases you are targeting. Whenever you undergo Link Building or other Offsite SEO strategies you should consider how the process is going to aid these three key factors.
Ranking websites against keyword searches effectively is a complex process. The search engines use hundreds of factors to determine where a particular webpage should rank. An increasing number of these factors are concerned with determining how other sites in the web view a site and its content. The reason for this is that the search engines have two basic challenges in ranking competing sites.
1) Just because a site looks good, works well and has good well optimised content does it mean that it is necessarily better than another competing website.
2) When looking at two or more competing sites that are equally as good on onsite factors how do they determine which is actually best.
The only way to solve these two problems is to look at how popular a site is with other websites, how relevant other sites think the site is to its content and targeted keywords, and whether it is being endorsed by any highly trusted sites on the net.
The three factors are intertwined and influence each other, so it is difficult to describe their influence concisely but here is a basic outline of the factors that affect them.
Website Popularity
Popularity is solely governed by the number of links that point to your site and the value (PageRank) that they are passing to your site. The search engines see every inbound link as a vote for your site. Certain links have more power in the voting process – typically sites who themselves have a large volume of links pointing to them. The more links you have pointing to your site the greater your popularity, plus the higher the PageRank of the sites pointing to you the more PageRank your site will gain.
Website Relevance
Relevance is governed by the theme of the sites and pages that link to you. Once the search engines have counted the links that are pointing to your site they try and determine why those links are pointing to your site. There are a few aspects to this but the most important to consider is whether the site or page that is linking to you is on a theme that matches yours and are linking to you because they feel you are a positive resource on that theme. Search engines will look at the onsite content elements of the page to determine theme relevance – page title tags, page keywords and the ‘anchor text’ of the link pointing to you. A link that has an important keyword in its anchor text is much more valuable for relevance than one that simply has your website name or ‘click here’ as the anchor.
Website Reputation
There are various elements involved in reputation. The most important is ‘trust’ as measured in links. The basic principle is that if your site has lots of links and some PageRank but none of the links come from very well respected and trusted sites then you will have very little trust attributed to your site. There are a very limited number of what could be referred to a ‘trust seeds’, these are sites that trust originates from and are given the ability to seed based on criteria which is sometimes external to the web.
A good example is www.direct.gov.uk – this would be ‘trust seed’ simply because it is the site of the UK government, which has trust offline. Sites like this also tend to have highly valuable, unique content, stringent rules on the type content used and external linking. The combination of factors makes sites like www.direct.gov.uk a perfect source for the distribution of trust. A link from this site would be very hard to come by and therefore will pass a lot of trust to your site, improving its reputation. It’s not always possible to get links from ‘trust seeds’ but if a ‘trust seed’ links to a site that then links to you, you will inherit some of the trust in the same way as you inherit PageRank. This aspect has often been referred to as TrustRank but is less quantifiable than PageRank.
