Page 139 - The Content Code: Six essential strategies to ignite your content, your marketing, and your business - PDFDrive.com
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The most important content did not rise to the top. The most important
websites did.
The “let’s figure out Google” cottage industry of experts estimates that a
rating of the trustworthiness and authority of a website accounts for nearly 25
percent of the overall search ranking algorithm. There’s a tight connection
between Google’s site rank and the public search results used to discover your
content. No wonder my post lost out when it was stacked against mega-blogs
with hundreds of thousands of readers!
SEO and digital relationships
Lee Odden, the CEO of TopRank Marketing and a scholar on site optimization,
provides a great explanation of how site authority works. It’s similar to personal
networking, only Google is the one watching how the relationships develop.
“I think the way to think about it is like networking in the real world,” Odden
said. “If you move into a new community and into a new job, a smart person is
going to want to establish credibility within this new area or organization, this
new sphere of influence. Otherwise, they’ll never get anything done or never
have any fun with new friends.
“It would make sense for a newcomer to seek out those who already have
authority in that neighborhood and create some reason for them to have a
conversation and a connection. If that results in an endorsement somehow—like
someone invites you to their party or over for dinner—it’s a sign to others that
you’re becoming important in the community too. As a metaphor, that’s what
Google is looking for—signals of credibility. I don’t know that Google actually
thinks of things in terms of the content author or not, but there’s an expression in
information retrieval called ‘entities.’
“A known entity can be human, or it can be a company, but it is a thing, like
a hub, and it creates content, and it has other entities citing it like blogs and
professional journals. These signals are the very origins of Google and the page
rank algorithm. Rather than the page rank being associated specifically to a
website or web pages, actually, because of the growth of social networks, there
are signals of credibility that can identify an individual and follow them
wherever they publish.
“If you have a Google+ account, if you have a Google mail account, or a
YouTube account, then Google can not only factor in the things it normally
looks at like links and content, but it can also look at some of that social stream
data and associations.
