Google’s Martin Splitt addressed a question regarding the potential of competitors to negatively impact a website’s trustworthiness. He clarified how Google evaluates site trustworthiness and explained why factors such as links and site traffic do not negatively affect Google’s perception of trustworthiness.
Trustworthiness
Google representatives, research papers, and patents often mention the concept of website trustworthiness, but there is no specific trust metric currently in use. It was confirmed long ago that multiple signals collectively indicate if a site could be trusted. However, these are just signals and do not constitute a trust algorithm.
When Google employees discuss whether a site is trustworthy, it’s best not to overthink it. They are simply referring to whether the site is deemed trustworthy.
Can A Competitor Create Negative Trustworthiness Signals?
The question raised concerned a competitor sending bot traffic to their site, which the individual believed was intended to make their site appear untrustworthy in Google’s algorithm.
This concern may stem from an idea that Google uses click metrics to rank web pages. However, most research on clicks relates to validating search results, not ranking pages; it’s generally a quality assurance measure.
The question posed was:
“Do I have to be concerned about bad actors trying to make our site appear untrustworthy by sending spam or fake traffic to my site? Since site trustworthiness is binary.”
By “binary,” the question seemed to imply that a site is either considered trustworthy or untrustworthy, with no middle ground.
Martin Splitt refuted the notion of a binary quality of trustworthiness and denied that traffic could influence Google’s perception of a site.
His response was:
“It’s not really binary and just by sending traffic from questionable sources to a site, that won’t be ‘tainted’.”
“Spam or fake traffic” does not have a negative impact on a site’s trustworthiness.
Martin explained that if a site itself is spammy, it will be seen as spammy. He confirmed that what other sites do, whether in terms of linking or traffic, does not influence a site’s perceived spamminess.
He further explained:
“If a site itself does shady things, such as spam, malware, sure, that’s a problem, but nobody gets to choose or control where traffic or links are coming from, so that’s not something Google Search will look at to judge a website’s trustworthiness.”
Bot Traffic Doesn’t Affect How Google Sees A Site
Almost every website encounters significant levels of hacker bots probing for vulnerabilities. Some bots repeatedly hit a site looking for non-existent pages. This is a common occurrence on the web, affecting every site.
Hence, Martin’s assertion that third parties cannot make another site appear untrustworthy is valid, particularly since all sites experience low-quality inbound links and bot traffic.
Listen to the SEO Office Hours podcast at the 18:48 minute mark:
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