90 Digital CEO Nick Garner talks about another important part of Trust Optimisation which is making sure that you don’t deceive users in this episode of CalvinAyre.com’s SEO Tip of the Week.
Short intro to Trust Optimization.
Along with on site optimization and link acquisition, there seems to be a third element to ranking well on Google, it’s called Trust Optimization. Trust Optimization is based on the information we have got from anecdotal evidence on click through rates and rankings along with explicit guidelines from Google stating what they are looking for in a trusted website. On with the post…
One of the consistent themes in trust optimisation is making sure you give users what they expect from Google search results. Deceptive page design is an important part of losing trust.
If you think about deceptiveness and lack of trust, if you deceive people and you’re found out, they won’t to trust you again. By association, if Google sent you to that ‘bad’ page, you won’t trust Google so much the next time.
Google have made a big deal of this in there 2014 quality rater guidelines. They say:
“7.3.2 Deceptive Page Design
• A fake search page is a page with a list of links that looks like a page of search results. If you click on a few of the links, you will see that the page is just a collection of Ads disguised as search engine results. A “search box” is present on the page, but if you submit a new query in the search box, you just get a different page of Ads disguised as search results. “Fake search” pages are examples of deceptive page design.
What this means.
As I’ve said in previous posts, if quality rater guidelines specifically points out things like fake search pages, then it makes sense the algo is looking for this kind of deception.
Do you remember a few years ago when Google Seemed to have been ranking lots of parked domains?
Often they would look like this:
To an unsuspecting user, it might even look like a real search page! As we’ve seen in recent years these kind of dead domains just don’t come up in the SERPs as often.
Moving on, google talk about fake directory pages which are actually ads.
“A fake directory page looks like a personally curated set of helpful links, possibly with unique descriptions. In reality, the links are Ads or links to other similar pages on the site. Fake directory pages are examples of deceptive page design. There are other examples of deceptive page design.”
They talk about pages deliberately designed to have a large number of ads at the top. I guess you’ve seen Taboola pages?
Click on a few of these and you will experience what Google hate so much…
They say:
“For example, some pages are deliberately designed to have a large amount of Ads at the top so that the MC is not visible unless a user scrolls a lot to see the content at the very bottom of the page. In other words, some users may not even realize the MC is on the page. Another example of deceptive page design is to make Ads look like navigation links or SC links, or even part of the MC.
Take a good look at the page and use your judgment. If you believe the page was deliberately created to manipulate users to click on Ads, monetized links, or suspect download links through deceptive page design, the page should be rated Lowest.”
If you ever wondered why these kinds of pages don’t rank anymore, it’s because Google can see their JavaScript and CSS and knows they are top heavy pages.
Affiliates, before you conclude this has nothing to do with you, think about a typical affiliate page with a dazzling number of banners and no meaningful content… It’s not the kind of thing that engenders trust from Google.
Sneaky redirects
Google say:
7.3.3 Sneaky Redirects
How to recognize sneaky redirects:
• While being redirected, you notice that the page redirects through several URLs before ending up on the landing page.
• You notice that clicking the same URL several times takes you to different landing pages on a rotating set of domains.
• You notice that you are redirected to well-known merchant websites, such as Amazon, eBay, Zappos, etc. to complete a transaction.
• The URL of the landing page is different than the URL in the rating task. You should compare the two URLs to see if it makes sense that one would redirect to the other. A redirect from a company’s old homepage to its new homepage on a different domain is not sneaky. Redirects from one page on one website to another page on the same website are also not sneaky. However, unexpected redirects from one website to a completely unrelated website should be considered deceptive.
• Look at the domain registrants. If you suspect that a sneaky redirect has taken place, you should check to see “whois” the registrant (or owner) of the two domains. If the registrants are the same, the redirect is less likely to be sneaky. “
How many times have you clicked around on an affiliate site thinking you’re going to go one way and then end up on an operator website?
If you put your Trust optimization hat on, adding unexpected redirects just makes people want to get out of your site as quickly as possible. Assuming the Google bot is clever enough to recognize a redirect, it makes sense they can spot multiple hops and redirects, after all they have explicitly said the bot’s behaviour far more like a browser than ever before.
From Google webmaster central – link
“Historically, Google indexing systems resembled old text-only browsers, such as Lynx, and that’s what our Webmaster Guidelines said. Now, with indexing based on page rendering, it’s no longer accurate to see our indexing systems as a text-only browser. Instead, a more accurate approximation is a modern web browser.”
Finally
In the past you could push the wire when it comes to deceptive page design and assume Google would not see it. Today if you do this kind of thing you are asking for trouble.
Of course there will be some very clever black hat SEO who has some work around, but for the majority of us, trying to be clever to get a few extra clicks on an ad is a fast way to get deranked.
Nick Garner is founder of 90 Digital, the well-known and respected iGaming search marketing agency.
Nick is obsessed with SEO and whatever it takes to rank sustainably on Google.
