The immediate answer, obviously, is yes - it does and should matter! Web credibility is an increasingly important issue and it seems that Google is of the same mindset, as recent developments have highlighted.
To get back to basics though, what is 'Web Cred'? The acknowledged key components of credibility are trustworthiness and expertise. These are the factors that Mr J Bloggs is looking for as he browses the web with a view to making an online purchase. Credibility is the key to conversion, especially when it comes to more expensive products and services.
Google and the other search engines are doing the same thing on behalf of their users when it comes to evaluating an e-commerce site. They are evaluating how credible a site is and do this by looking at linkage data amongst other factors.
Back in March, as Google's Bigdaddy data centres were reaching completion, webmasters suddenly noticed that their sites' pages weren't being indexed. They were simply found as supplemental results, pages which have been collected from the web, just like the 3.3 billion pages in Google's main index, but haven't been receiving the usual frequency of 'spider' visitations.
Matt Cutts - Google mouthpiece - explains, on his site blog, that after looking at some affected sites:
"I could tell the issue in a few minutes. The sites that fit "no pages in Bigdaddy" criteria were sites where our algorithms had very low trust in the inlinks or the outlinks of that site. Examples that might cause that include excessive reciprocal links, linking to spammy neighbourhoods on the web, or link buying/selling."
In effect Google has decided to penalise sites which it feels have gained the majority of their links through unnatural means. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) companies are finding that the links that they had generated for their clients are now not being reported with the link command in Google. Credibility is being assessed and where its being found wanting action is being taken.
