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Over on Porn Resource today I talked about credible websites and wondered whether or not that was what Google's Panda update was all about. Did Google in some way manage to work the issue of credibility into their algorithm and now we're seeing the effects?

Google has certainly turned human testers loose on a wide range of websites and basically asked them whether they found those sites credible or not so it could be that credibility may now be an important part of Google's algorithm.

Of course Google probably didn't use the word 'credible' in the instructions they gave to their human reviewers. Instead they asked questions like:

"Would you be comfortable giving this site your credit card? Would you be comfortable giving medicine prescribed by this site to your kids?"

Obviously the answers to those questions go a long way to establishing the credibility of a website. And credibility obviously isn't just a matter of importance for the search engines ... it's a matter of great importance if you want people to trust you enough to buy what you're selling.

As far back as 2002 people where thinking about what makes a website more or less credible than another and the author of “Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do” suggested that surfers consider four main factors when they're looking at a website and trying to decide if it's credible or not.

Back then web surfers were influenced by the domain extension ... and that undoubtedly still applies today. People are far more likely to trust a domain with a .gov extension than they are likely to trust domains with .info extensions.

Web surfers will also be influenced by the look and feel of a website. Does it look professional or does it look more than a little rough around the edges?

Many websites have earned credibility because surfers have been to the site before and found that the information they were given on their previous visits was correct.

The final factor that surfers will think about when they're trying to assess the credibility of a website is what other people have told them about the site. Did other people have positive comments to make about the site or were there more negative comments made about the site?

Obviously here an adult we're already in negative territory with all four factors simply because we're here in adult. Over the years we've destroyed our credibility and traded long-term profits for short-term gains and now we're paying the price for that stupid approach.

Sure we made money back then and thought nothing of screwing as much as we could out of the surfers who visited our sites but now that money and the good times have gone so we've got to work a whole lot harder to get people who visit our sites to follow the links and spend some money.

So how do we do that?

Well to be honest I doubt that we can ever improve how we look when three of those factors are applied to our sites. Of course we're never going to get the right domain extension and moving to something like a .xxx TLD is probably only going to make things worse.

Unless we already have a major brand in the world of online adult ... a brand like The Hun for example ... we're probably not going to be able to earn much in the way of credibility. Sure, we can build up some of that credibility but it will take time and it's not going to help in the short-term.

We're also not going to be able to do much as far as getting others to talk positively about our sites and to encourage their friends to visit unless we start branding our sites so people reconise where they have come from. Even then that's going to take a lot of time before we could expect to see any positive effect.

That only leaves the second factor in the list of four ... and that is something we can work on. We can improve the appearance of our websites and one quick way to do that is to take the appearance of the site away from the typical appearance that so many adult sites have.

There have got to be better background colors than black and there's got to be better language to use on the site than the slang terms we so often use. Think about the professionalism that people are impressed by and then think about how professional our sites appear to be.

Sure ... you're marketing porn but that doesn't mean that your sites have to give the impression that they have just crawled out of the gutter or staggered out of a dark alley.

If you want to give people the impression that you and your websites can be trusted then perhaps it's time to make them look a little more high-class and whole lot less like a back-street drug dealer or pimp.