A website is no longer a trust signal. Everyone in the world who has ever surfed the web is painfully aware of how easy it is for shady people to put up a site and use it for evil.
Remember those old trust ranking services? We’d pay them money to put a little graphic on our sites which was supposed to indicate we were trustworthy. No one cared and it worked for about 5 minutes. Anyone can put a .jpeg on their site that falsely indicates the site is safe to do business with.
We’ve tried just about everything under the sun except the obvious. With the new, open, social web, the only thing people trust is not a thing at all. It’s other people. People who are verified by other verified people.
The one thing that is impossible to game on the web is human trust ranking, or authority. You cannot get a serious, reputable person to endorse you sight unseen. They have to know you and know about you, and feel good about what they know, before they’d ever consider putting their hard-won reputation on the line for you.
For people who thought the internet was a great place to be a nobody and still run a successful web business, this is really bad news. Old news. But bad all the same.
Today, more than any time in the history of the web, you just can’t make a living by hiding behind fancy graphic or even really great content. People today follow people. Not sites. Not logos. Not just good content post by the mousy librarian type who wants her words to speak for her.
Granted, no one really cares who snapped a photo of the dog balancing a dog cookie on his nose in order to appreciate it. But that’s the exception to the rule. When it comes to content that people need to rely on in some way to make decisions, make their lives better, or to learn how to do something, people are swarming those who stand out as authorities and not the generic domains with all content and no personality.
Yes, we all end up on those kinds of sites accidentally, because Google hasn’t yet mastered the art of telling the two apart. Yet being the operative word. They get closer every day to being able to reward those who deserve to be ranked based upon indicators that other real humans truly vouch for them. They do it now, but it’s not perfect.
In short, there are no real viable ways to game the system anymore. Not unless you’re into masochistic levels of frustration and work.
A blog is just that, a blog. Not a person. A shopping cart is not a person. If someone were to have two links placed in front of them, and one of them was Amazon.com, it doesn’t even matter what the other link is, everyone’s going to Amazon.com. But if the same two links were put in front of people, and now the “not Amazon” link has background on the people behind the site, what they think about their company and how much they believe in their products and their customers along with some testimonials from credible sources, then Amazon.com begins to lose fast.
You can’t artificially replicate the human factor behind products and sites. We know this because we’ve seen every serious attempt fail before our eyes. Once it comes down to picking a site with just information on it, even if it’s great information, and a site with real people behind it with reputations for quality work and vouchers from other reputable people, there’s no contest. People win every time.
So if you’re going to succeed with your web business, you have to come out of the closet and get in front of, not behind, your business. Logos, fancy graphics, professionally crafted sales copy – that stuff is old hat. Anyone and everyone can do that now and the web knows it. The web also knows how to tell a real person from a fake one pretty well. Not always, but we’re getting very accurate these days.
How much is human in what you’re putting out on the web? There’s a direct correlation between a site’s popularity and how much of an authority the site’s author holds in the market. Whether it is a brand, in individual, or a small business site, the most successful sites on the web have interesting, follow-worthy people behind them and not just the best content or logos.
