Are You In The Circle Of Link Trust?

Eric Enge, January 22nd, 2007 at 9:44 am ET:

Well said, Eric. I have seen the “circle of trust” work for sites we work on too. It’s amazing how quickly you can gain rank for major terms once you are in the circle. You can rank for competitive terms in a week or two.

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Mike McDonald, January 22nd, 2007 at 4:52 pm ET:

I agree 100% with the circle of trust concept. I have no doubt we can find lots of examples – I’ve seen it work in our own network many times. However, the obvious question then becomes ‘how do you get in there?’

As you suggested, trust is a relative term to a great extent. Google being Google and all they no doubt have some sort of scoring system to establish the parameters of the ‘circle’… so what are we looking at?

I agree that age of domain is probably a factor… but what else? How does one objectively ’score’ reputation? Type of links in? The ‘circle status’ of inbound link sites? The quality and number of sites you link to – and their ‘circle status’?

All/some/none of the above algorithmically scored and sorted. On the one hand it leaves you marveling yet again at those clever Googlers. On the other hand it’s not hard to see where webmasters might be increasingly paranoid and worried about who they link and how they are linked…

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Michael Martinez, January 23rd, 2007 at 12:10 pm ET:

Domain age really doesn’t matter when it comes to achieving rankings success, but older domains are more likely to have earned many natural inbound links.

However, trust begins at home. If you don’t trust your own content enough to link to it and show the search engines which pages you feel are most important, why should anyone else?

I’ve been advising people to do this for years, and for years I’ve watched many sites do just fine by working first with their own links and content and not pursuing aggressive link building strategies.

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Frank T, January 24th, 2007 at 11:07 am ET:

I couldn’t agree with you more Danny. I’ve seen this hold true for the last few years. I guess it can be another word for the sandbox theory. I prefer to call it the “shinizil circle”. Any site not within the “shinizil circle”, isn’t worth a shinizil! :)

Have fun in the great Pacific Northwest, it’s a lil chilly here!

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Halfdeck, February 22nd, 2007 at 4:24 am ET:

I like the circle of trust reference, but I don’t see how the term “link bait strategies” is competitive. Sure, it returns over a million results. But how much traffic does it yield, and how many sites are aggressively targetting that term?

“allintitle:link bait strategy” returns 20 results, while “allintitle:link bait strategies” returns 6 results. So just a handful of sites are aggressively targetting that phrase. Unique/month for both keywords are close to nil as well.

So I don’t think you need a whole lot of “trust” to rank for that term. You got a link from the home page with the term in the anchor text, the word “linkbait” in the url and the term in the TITLE element. Other pages that come up for that term all mention you, so I also assume those pages link to your page. I think that’s all you need.

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