Google Inside

This may be like beating a dead horse, but I feel it’s a point that should be brought up again.

It’s becoming more and more apparent that Google trusts authority more than anything with its algorithm. Right, of course, this is obvious. But, what I want to look at today is how Google actually shows respect to authority.

Almost a year ago, Google announced that it would be launching Universal Search. The announcement of Universal Search opens a lot of new opportunities for Google grow beyond normal search and do what they do best, search.

Let’s start with a regular query. A query for “google news” where I rank on the second page for US queries.

Looking at those results, you can clearly see that not much authority has yet been given to this site, ginside.com.

Let’s take a look at a different query. A search for “fireside media” returns some results with something called Google Sitelinks. If you have any Sitelinks, they can be viewed in your Google Webmaster Tools account. Here is the search query result,

So from this query, we can see that Google is giving at least a little bit more authority to the domain, firesidemedia.net, which displays Sitelinks. You can see a preview of what the Sitelinks look like for this site in Google Webmaster Tools.

Moving on, let’s take a look at yet another query. The next query is for the brand name of “best buy“.

We discussed the second search box earlier, but it’s part of how we can tell what is authority and what is not.

The query for “best buy” has both the Google Sitelinks as well as the second search box which leaves us to conclude only one thing: Google gives the domain bestbuy.com a lot of trust in its index and search results. For example, do a search for “gift cards“, a very popular keyword, bestbuy.com is ranked in the top 10 results.

Google has built this “trust” on the domain through a number of different SEO factors. A large part of it is age. I won’t be diving into SEO and how Google actually builds the trust, but Google certainly treats trust and authority a lot differently.