Like this, like that, tweet this, tweet that. And now we have Google +1. Because of these user input signals I believe that significant changes are coming to the world of search.
The change I’m referring to comes down to a single word… trust. Without trust your website will fail. Why? I believe it’s due to the rapid growth of using social signals in search.
Social Signals and Search
Think rank.
- PageRank – PageRank is a link analysis algorithm, named after Larry Page, used by the Google Internet search engine that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents… more ->
- AuthorRank - A system may receive a feed associated with a blog. The system may extract information from the feed and the blog and create a hybrid document based on the extracted information. The system may further use the hybrid document to determine a relevance of the blog to a search… more ->
- TrustRank - (PDF) TrustRank is a link analysis technique described in a paper by Stanford University and Yahoo! researchers for semi-automatically separating useful webpages from spam… more ->
Are you seeing it yet? If not, keep reading.
Trust and PPC
It was recently spotted by Vinny O’Hare that Google is running a test on PPC ads. This test is showing you the number of clicks on the PPC ads. What is not clear is if the number represents the number of clicks for that campaign, those search terms or that exact ad.
Image credit: Vinny O'Hare @vinnyohare
Steven Weldler also saw a similar test that Google says is running on a very small sampling of users.
Image Credit: Steven Weldler @SeoSteven
Recently, I had a phone conversation with two PPC reps from Google and they were almost giddy in their desire to have us add the Google +1 button to our site. Google sent emails to both our advertising department and PPC department in hopes of getting us to add the Google +1 button. In all correspondence with Google they made it a point to say that the behavior of Google +1 will play a part in organic search results.
From Google: We’ll also start to look at +1’s as one of the many signals we use to determine a page’s relevance and ranking, including social signals from other services.
Now do you see it? It’s called trust!
It’s Time to Build Trust
If you want to make money online as an affiliate marketer you better start thinking about how you’re going to build trust with your users.
Final example: Recently, Google made two major changes to its algorithm; first to target spammy/scraper sites, followed by the larger Panda update that targeted “low quality” sites. In response to the outcry from people claiming they were innocent and shouldn’t have been penalized, Amit Singhal from Google had this to say.
If the answer is no, you have no trust. Without trust your website will fail.
