Scoreboard Media Group, Internet Audience Development

Domain Trust.  It’s the invisible online equivalent of your FICO score.  If you come up short, you’re out of the game.  If you have it in abundance, Google will let you buy that Carrera GT with zero down.

Sorry.  About eight and a half minutes have passed since I wrote that last paragraph…

Anyways, while I was split-screening that video for the 743rd time with my checking account, two other things were happening:

1)  My sites were ranking for stuff they have no business ranking for.
2)  At least a dozen jackhole SEO’s in various bars around the country were chatting up a 6 telling her how they ranked for a specific phrase.

About 18 months ago, I saw the writing on the wall.  Sites like About.com, Ebay, Howstuffworks.com, Answers.com… even the unmonetized, bad content spamming of Wikipedia to a lesser extent…were ranking for the most competitive technology phrases and a few of them were the most egregious sites in terms of Webmaster Guidelines violations.  But they had trust.  Some would even call it a “metric shitload.”

While we sat alongside those sites for some of the most glamorous technology phrases, it was predominantly on the back of anchor text.  While allinanchor:[keyword] is still a pretty good measure of a competitive SERPs, it’s probably best reserved for specific affiliate plays.  Building an online media audience should consider a lifetime cost of acquiring a user rather than arbitraging their mindset right now.  The goal of an audience developer is not to “be where they are buying”, it’s several orders of magnitude higher.  It’s more like VISA, “everywhere you want to be…I should be jamming my SERPs down your throat.”  But, I digress…

You see, not only was Google cranking up the Trust Knob every month, the other devastating blow to being the One Trick Monkey anchor text SEO, was that searchers are getting smarter everyday.  The Long Tail is getting fatter and fatter and fatter.  You could now say that the Long Tail officially has “junk in the trunk” and she’s not afraid to shake her moneymaker.

So, while a few people got really scared when we stopped ranking for the vanity stuff, their fears were quickly assuaged when we started popping up for just about every 3-5 word query in our vertical.  Traffic is up about triple year-over-year and revenue is up about 500%.  Domain trust took us from building $xxx,xxx/year sites to multi-million dollar a year sites. 

Why?  Not because of my vanity and my need to go play Whip Out in “Bar SERPs”, but because we built up so much freaking trust.  We looked at every signal of trust Google was interpreting and we bombed it.  Guess what?  We also became a much better experience for our users in the process.  2002-2005 BP just threw up in his mouth…

I also can’t help but think that no matter how much you try to chase SERPs, you’ve essentially committed yourself to a glass ceiling on earnings.  It’s a resource-constrained chase.  If you chase trust, the sky is the f’ing limit.  In fact, we spend quite a bit of time now trying to monetize traffic we trip into when we used to be 100% selling against defined inventory.  Viva la trust!

I still think in the balance of domain trust vs. SERPs chasing, the affiliate folks should lean a little closer to the known high converting SERPs due to the nature of that game.  But for the definitive online audience builder, the smartest thing you can do is to (and here comes the obligatory sports analogy) stop trying to drive the green and start thinking your way around the course via signals of domain trust.