Verisign Trust Seal and Domain Metrics (Has noting to do with SSL)
-
Hi,
Does anyone have any evidence or case studies that Verisign Trust seal actually raises trust metrics?
I know there are the obvious benefits such as better CTR and Conversion (which could in turn raise trust metrics). But i am looking for actual sighted examples of Verisign increasing trust signals to search engines discrediting the correlation between search metrics improving.
I modified this as i think people are getting confused between SSL products and the specific Versign product i am talking about Verisign Trust Seal seen here. https://www.verisign.com/trust-seal/index.html?tid=gnps
This has nothing to do with security for transactions it is more geared towards all around safer user experience including Malware scans and enhanced "stand out" in SERPS. It is not just a Domain validation but an organizational or Branding authentication check"
With that being said, the question still stands Does anyone have any case studies or direct examples of trust being elevated in metrics for the specific product mentioned above.
Thanks.
-
Shane, it tends to be the sites that manipulate the rankings (black hat) know all those tricks and if all it took was a seal from an SSL company, they would have a different one on each page. It would be surprising that the seal actually gives you page rank, it most likely does the opposite since an outbound link only passes juice to the destination and all those seals link directly to the ssl provider.
As Ryan points out contacting Verisign directly will give you some insight, they are a company built on reputation and would not say it adds Google rank when it does not. You have to consider what their product is 'trust' and if they give you false information that hurts their marketting when you discover that is not the case. They would tell you what I said in my first reply, that their seal brings customer conversions, which is ultimately what you are after.
Generally ecommerce sites exclude their ssl pages via robots.txt or nofollows so the question does not get raised. If the content on those pages is secure but not authenticated then the value is limited as it is public and open to exploit. As a developer, I have attended many seminars on this topic alone.
The rank gain you get is secondary (from more tweets, blog links etc because people trust your site and like it) rather than a direct corelation.
Read the paper (relevant section below) from the link:
If I use SSL on my pages, will we be PageRank'd higher then non-ssl pages? So far, there is NO conclusive proof that a SSL site will get higher Google/MSN/Yahoo search rank listing compared to the same site which is unencrypted. In fact there seems to be no positive or negative result if you have your pages encrypted or not. This is because the quality of the data on the site is not validated by SSL, only that the certificate is independently verified. The most important factor in Google's PageRank for example is the amount of high quality sites linking back to your site. The idea being that if a site like Digg or CNN link to your site then your page rank will increase because their page rank is high. This is completely independent of whether your page is encrypted or not.
-
I know what the trust seal is (and most often it's accompanied by an SSL certificate signed by Verisign). But if you took a poll of people and asked them who Verisign is, I bet the majority wouldn't have a clue. Thus I don't pay for their seal (which I could have gotten with an SSL certificate). This is the only real difference in their costs.
Remember, the trust seal only shows up if you're running AVG antivirus in your browser
-
I guess we will just have to agree to disagree. From a marketing perspective and knowing what i know about marketing and sales closing tactics I tend to feel that a company no matter where they point you will never be the counter argument, always the pro argument.
This is why your suggestion to me seems counter intuitive as i had obviously already picked out a specific product, and done research on it.
Also not to mention that if they had readily available information that proved they made domain (or brand) trust metrics with search engines go up (especially knowing what we now know about Panda), why would they not have that front in center as SEO's would be lining up at the door for that opportunity, in my opinion.
-
Actually Shane I carefully read your Question.
"Does anyone have any evidence or case studies...."
To clarify my response, I am not aware of any case studies being performed. If you are looking for "evidence", then the vendor may have that information. You can then determine for yourself the value of that evidence.
One more point. Vendors are usually aware of ALL the case studies performed on their product, even if they didn't perform the case study themselves. Using your SEOmoz example, if someone wrote an article on "What is the best SEO tool suite", then SEOmoz would probably be aware of it and COULD refer you to the article.
Of course, if that article wasn't objective or favorable, they may not. It would depend on the article and the ethics of the company involved.
-
.....
Hmmmm
I guess the wording of case study (meaning actual research done by a third party to investigate something or research) was missed.
Of course a company will tell me what i want to hear....
I was asking for specific case studies (that apparently do not exist because no one can seem to grasp the question) not a recommendation from the company itself.
Is SEOMOZ the best SEO tool suite? (i think so) but i would not recommend calling SEOMOZ to get that info..... seems kind of counter intuitive, granted companies "spin" data to look the best always in their favor...
-
Shane, Verisign offers a toll-free contact number. If I was in your situation I would pick up the phone and give them a call. If any data exists on this topic, they will surely have it.
They may have to research it a bit, but if they do not know, then I would suggest the data does not exist.
-
It can help your click through conversion rate if it is on the checkout page near the 'pay' button as it can build user confidence. I agree that a lot of users do not know all the safety measures developers put into a site, but if you give them a warm and fuzzy feeling when they are about to purchase and a place to check your security or privacy policy, then they are more likely to complete the sale.
I would doubt it adds rank but with Google's emphasis on usability it may be a factor on legitimising your site, especially if you have an EV SSL as the process is more rigerous to be validated.
-
Hi,
I am not talking about SSL, I am talking about the Trust Seal which DOES improve CTR as the seal is shown in search engines.
Of course SSL would not affect as this is only a certificate, but the Verisign Trust seal is an identity confirmation and a "thumbs up" for security aspects.
-
If your average user even knows who Verisign is I'd be amazed. I have an EV SSL certificate through Godaddy (who is more well known, but for other reasons) and I've not seen any indication that anyone even knows the difference. I've even found many users don't even know what the green bar in the browser means (and Safari doesn't help by making just the protocol text green).
As far as Google goes, I can't say Google does anything significant with SSL, let alone care who your SSL is with.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Cross Domain Canonicalization for Site Folder
Hello colleagues! I have a client who decided to launch a separate domain so they could offer their content translated for other countries. Each country (except the US/English) content lives in its own country folder as follows: client.com/01/02/zh
Technical SEO | | SimpleSearch
client.com/01/02/tw etc. The problem is that they post the content in US/English on this domain too. It does NOT have its own folder, but exists righth after the date (as in the above example) Oh, and the content is the same as on their "main" domain so google likes to index that sometimes vs. the original client on the domain where we want the traffic to go. SO, is there a way to say "hey google, please index the US content only on the main domain, but continue to index the translated content in these folders on this totally separate domain?" Thank you so much in advance.0 -
General SSL Questions After Move
Hello, We have moved our site to https, Google Analytics seems to be tracking correctly. However, I have seen some conflicting information, should I create a new view in analytics? Additionally, should I also create a new https property in Google search console and set it as the preferred domain? If so, should I keep the old sitemap for my http property while updating the sitemap to https only for the https property? Thirdly, should I create a new property as well as new sitemaps in Bing webmaster? Finally, after doing a crawl on our http domain which has a 301 to https, the crawl stopped after the redirect, is this a result of using a free crawling tool or will bots not be able to crawl my site after this redirect? Thanks for all the help in advance, I know there are a lot of questions here.
Technical SEO | | Tom3_150 -
Images on sub domain fed from CDN
I have a client that uses a CDN to fill images, from a sub domain ( images.domain.com). We've made sure that the sub domain itself is not blocked. We've added a robots.txt file, we're creating an image sitemap file & we've verified ownership of the domain within GWT. Yet, any crawler that I use only see's the first page of the sub domain (which is .html) but none of the subsequent URL's which are all .jpeg. Is there something simple I'm missing here?
Technical SEO | | TammyWood0 -
Sub Domains and Robot.txt files...
This is going to seem like a stupid question, and perhaps it is but I am pulling out what little hair I have left. I have a sub level domain on which a website sits. The Main domain has a robots.txt file that disallows all robots. It has been two weeks, I submitted the sitemap through webmaster tools and still, Google has not indexed the sub domain website. My question is, could the robots.txt file on the main domain be affecting the crawlability of the website on the sub domain? I wouldn't have thought so but I can find nothing else. Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | Vizergy0 -
Why the rapid drop in Domain Authority?
I couple weeks ago I switched my website from Drupal to a Wordpress CMS: Martial Arts Austin My rankings have remained the same, but the Domain Authority has plummeted from like 29 to 21. I know this is small fry, but I don't want my business to drop in ranking. The URL's were kept exactly the same, with the internal links and copy also kept the same with few additions. Also, according to Open Site Explorer, the site's stronger pages have now averaged out with the weaker and unused pages so they all now share the same Page Authority - that doesn't seem right. Is there reason for concern? Did I screw something up, or am I making too much of this? Thanks
Technical SEO | | OhYeahSteve1 -
External Links from own domain
Hi all, I have a very weird question about external links to our site from our own domain. According to GWMT we have 603,404,378 links from our own domain to our domain (see screen 1) We noticed when we drilled down that this is from disabled sub-domains like m.jump.co.za. In the past we used to redirect all traffic from sub-domains to our primary www domain. But it seems that for some time in the past that google had access to crawl some of our sub-domains, but in december 2010 we fixed this so that all sub-domain traffic redirects (301) to our primary domain. Example http://m.jump.co.za/search/ipod/ redirected to http://www.jump.co.za/search/ipod/ The weird part is that the number of external links kept on growing and is now sitting on a massive number. On 8 April 2011 we took a different approach and we created a landing page for m.jump.co.za and all other requests generated 404 errors. We added all the directories to the robots.txt and we also manually removed all the directories from GWMT. Now 3 weeks later, and the number of external links just keeps on growing: Here is some stats: 11-Apr-11 - 543 747 534 12-Apr-11 - 554 066 716 13-Apr-11 - 554 066 716 14-Apr-11 - 554 066 716 15-Apr-11 - 521 528 014 16-Apr-11 - 515 098 895 17-Apr-11 - 515 098 895 18-Apr-11 - 515 098 895 19-Apr-11 - 520 404 181 20-Apr-11 - 520 404 181 21-Apr-11 - 520 404 181 26-Apr-11 - 520 404 181 27-Apr-11 - 520 404 181 28-Apr-11 - 603 404 378 I am now thinking of cleaning the robots.txt and re-including all the excluded directories from GWMT and to see if google will be able to get rid of all these links. What do you think is the best solution to get rid of all these invalid pages. moz1.PNG moz2.PNG moz3.PNG
Technical SEO | | JacoRoux0 -
How to Redirect only specific pages to new domain
My HTACCESS FILE IS AS FOLLOWS: rewriteengine on
Technical SEO | | askthetrainer
rewritecond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mydomain.com$
rewriterule ^mydomain/(.*)$ "http://www.mydomain.com/$1" [R=301,L] #4d864805b49b5 I want to move ONLY specific pages from this domain to a new domain How do I edit my HTACCESS (which redirects http:// to www.) to move specific pages from old domain (which I have to delete) to new domain.... I.e. http://mydomaon.com/move.html needs to move to http://mynewdomain.com/move.html Where i can delete the original domains0 -
Why Google did not index our domain?
Hi, We launched tmart 60 days ago and submitted to google, bing, yahoo 20 days later. But google had never indexed our website still when yahoo indexed it in one week. What we have checked or tried: 1. We got 20~50 inlinks in one month and now 81 inlinks via yahoo site explorer. 2. This domain has registered for 13 years and we purchased it from sedo last year. We
Technical SEO | | zt673
did not find any problems from domain archive pages. 3. Page similar: the homepage is 50% similar to one of our competitors when we just launched.
So we adjusted the page structure and modified the content one month later and decreased the similarity to 30% (by tools from webconfs.com) 4. Google Robots: googlebot crawled our website every day after we submitted for indexing.
We opened GWT account for it and added the xml sitemap last week. GWT said nothing
was wrong except the time of page loading. Our questions: Why google did not indexed our website? What should we do? Thanks, wu0