Reputation lives off your domain, and raters are told to go find it

Reputation lives off your domain, and raters are told to go find it

The question: when a quality rater assesses your trustworthiness, where do they look?

Not primarily at your own pages. The QRG instructs raters to perform reputation research — to leave the website and search for independent, third-party information about the creator and the site. The guidelines name specific source types: independent reviews, references, news articles, expert recommendations, and for some entities, Wikipedia or industry-specific reputation sources.

The instruction is asymmetric. A site saying 'we are the trusted leader' counts for little. The guidelines explicitly tell raters that the website's own claims about itself are not reputation; reputation is what independent sources say. A small number of credible, specific third-party references outweighs volumes of self-description.

The guidelines also instruct raters to weigh the credibility of the reviewers themselves, and to be skeptical of suspiciously uniform praise — a signal that maps onto the reality of bought and seeded reviews.

For practitioners, the operational consequence is that off-page reputation work — earned mentions, being cited by credible third parties, accurate listings — is doing the heavy lifting that on-page tweaks cannot.

Caveat: rater reputation research informs the evaluation of the systems, not a direct per-URL input. The systems approximate it with their own signals; the two are correlated, not identical.

What we still don't know: the threshold at which a thin or absent external reputation actively suppresses a site versus merely failing to help it.