Google’s John Mueller responded to a question about improving trust with Google during a Google Office-hours hangout. Trustworthiness, as well as expertise and authority, are hot topics. In his response, Mueller addresses the issue of trust factors.
E-A-T and trustworthiness
Trustworthiness has become a big deal lately because Google’s Quality Raters Guidelines describe how Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness are important things for search quality raters to look for when evaluating search results for specific types of queries, particularly those in the Your Money or Your Life categories, such as finance and medical search queries.
As a result, it’s natural for an SEO to want to know how to improve their trustworthiness with Google.
Google Searches Related to Trust Factors
If you do a Google search for:
What exactly are Google trust factors?
Google responds with a number of websites that make a variety of claims:
The most popular website:
“What is the Trust Factor? Google’s trust factor is a combination of many factors that they use to apply a value of how trustful a site is. The more trustful a site is seen the more likely its articles will be ranked higher on specific Google searches.”
The number two search result:
“Google TrustRank helps Google and other search engines combat web spam. Specifically, TrustRank measures so-called “trust signals”.”
The number three search result:
” In reality, whether or not Google trusts your site depends on several factors. Security is a leading factor.”
Search result number 4:
“Google uses trust signals to evaluate the genuineness of other ranking factors.”
One site published a periodic table of SEO factors:
“Here we dive into the Trust elements of the Periodic Table of SEO Factors.”
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However, there is an irony in Google’s search results because the information about a Trust Factor is incorrect.
John Mueller’s response appears to contradict everything that all of the answers in Google’s own search results claim.
How to Increase Trust
The questioner wanted to know what the best way was to increase trust with Google, presumably in order to achieve higher rankings.
Here’s the query:
“Does a website which includes great content improve in trust with Google or is that only determined through links?”
Google’s John Mueller answered:
“I don’t think we have like a trust factor that we can look at and say, oh trust is at (I don’t know) nine of out of twelve or whatever number you would have there.
So that’s kind of (I don’t know) …it’s almost like a philosophical question at that point.
It’s like, does improving the quality of your content overall make a website more trustworthy with regards to Google?
And like well… I don’t know. There are no metrics specifically for that.”
There are no metrics for measuring trust
A metric is a method of measuring and evaluating something. According to John Mueller, Google does not have a metric for measuring trustworthiness.
The only reason trustworthiness is important in the search quality raters guidelines is that it is what the third party raters are looking for.
However, this does not imply that it is a part of Google’s algorithms or that there is a Google algorithm that rates the trustworthiness of websites.
Improving Content Is a Good Strategy
Mueller then validated the practice of content improvement.
He continued his response:
“I think improving the quality of your content is always a good idea.
But it’s uh …lots of things are involved there.
And when it comes to trust it’s definitely not a matter of just links that are pointing at a website.”
There are no metrics for trust, and the only thing that exists are links
It’s never a good idea to take a portion of what’s written in a patent or what John Mueller says and make it mean something that doesn’t belong in the context of the entire patent or statement.
John Mueller’s response that there is no metric for trustworthiness came in response to a question about whether “great content” or “links” help improve trust with Google.
Rather than focusing on whether links or content influence Google to trust a website, Mueller advises against attempting to influence a non-existent trust factor.
He encourages the individual to concentrate on improving the content. Content is one of the few things over which publishers have complete control, which cannot be said of legitimate links.
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