TRAFFIC
THE RISE OF TRUSTED SITES
AND TRUST OPTIMISATION
In the last issue of iGB Affiliate, Nick Garner explored the emergent phenomenon of sites being able to
rank despite having no quality links. This edition sees the 90Digital founder dig deeper into the rise of
trusted sites and how to optimise your sites for this.
TrUST OPTiMiSATiON iS the process
for making your site more trusted by
Google so it can rank more easily.
First of all, it’s important to make clear
that trust is relative. A trusted casino
affiliate site would be a very untrusted
somewhere else. That’s why it’s about
looking at trust within your space.
Who is trusted?
I’ve spent a huge amount of time trawling
through large amounts of data to identify
websites which seem to be trusted.
Figures 1 and 2 provide an overview of
the iGaming search landscape.
In these charts, the black line represents
organic cost of traffic, so the higher the
cost, the more value they get from SEO.
The blue bars represent number of
referring domains where trust flow is
above 15, and the grey bars represent trust
flow. The dotted lines are trend lines.
One metric I’m really interested in is
the ratio of referring domains to organic
traffic cost. In other words, how successful
is a domain per referring link?
What’s interesting here is the lack of
correlation between referring domains and
search traffic to a site.
I used to imagine certain domains
dominating because they get most links,
but the data doesn’t show us that kind of
tight correlation.
There are so many factors to consider,
such as on-site optimisation, quality
and relevance of links, but even
accounting for that, this still doesn’t
explain the lack of correlation between
volume of search traffic and referring
domains. My only explanation is there is
a third element at play called trust.
If you are interested in reviewing
the data first hand, you can download
the original Excel sheets at http://goo.gl/
v098tO
Figure 1: Operator trust flow
iGB Affiliate Issue 48 DEC/JAN 2014/2015
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