Last time I checked Google wasn't releasing their algo to anyone - so it is very difficult to prove it one way or another. That said I have definitely read around the place that there have been whispers on the grape vine at search conferences that it is "a" factor, but once again, it's nothing to stir the pot about.
It's easy as baking an apple pie, actually. Look at how many sites are ranking well WITHOUT privacy policies. Want a good example? As far as I can tell, DIGITAL POINT lacks a privacy policy.
Just because sites rank well without a privacy policy doesn't mean having a privacy policy isn't a factor in their algo. I would definitely wager that in aggregate sites with PP's, TOS's or TAC's would be of better quality than those without.
This is terrible logic. Obviously bigger sites are not going to be affected by small things such a privacy policy. Small sites however need to get hold of anything they can and so a privacy policy might just be important to sites that aren't top 1000AlexaRank. Put it this way. If you have 1 link and you build another you have just increased your backlinks 100%. If you have 100,000,000 and you build another you have just increased your backlinks by ... next to nadda.
I have sites and have seen sites that aren't large, yet rank very well across the board for their targeted keywords. You know what? They don't have privacy policies. Remember, not every Web site needs a privacy policy - if it did, a large swath of the Web wouldn't rank well. Period. End of story.
No one is saying that if a site doesn't have a privacy policy it won't rank well. I have loads of sites without one that rank really well - and are #1 for hundreds of competitive keywords. What we are saying is that somewhere deep in google ranking algo they probably have a variable that says "if site has privacy policy, then improve rankings by 0.3%" or something like that. It's not significant to rankings, but it is still there. Also Google is probably sophisticated enough to recognise that not all sites need a privacy policy and so might first look for certain things on a website like a form element before even doing a search for a privacy policy. So google bot might be cruising the web and do something like "if form element found, then look for privacy policy, if privacy policy found, then improve rankings by 0.3%, else penalise by 0.3%."
So theory and speculation is once again taking the place of solid fundamentals and common sense. Okay, stick a fork in me; I'm done with this thread. (Exits stage left.)
Pot calling the kettle black I'm afraid. You're speculating just as much as we are. I'd like to see an SEO expert's view on this.
I'm sorry but I have to agree w/ Dan. I doubt Google would be stupid enough to implement some off the wall ranking factor for privacy policy when they KNOW good and well that they cannot detect them accurately and fairly across almost all sites... They can do so for Adsense advertisers because those sites get reviewed manually just like Adwords accounts. But trying to do something like that for every random blog and web site on the internet would be ludicrous. How do you think they could detect that you have a privacy policy? Are they going to look for some random page on your site with the word "privacy" on it? Are they going to look for link text "privacy policy"? Where are they going to look for links to this "policy"? Do you only get credit for this ranking factor if it's found in the templated portion of every page on the site like the header or footer? What about sites that only link to it on their home page and nowhere else? Or from their About Us page and nowhere else? What about sites that don't use "privacy" or "privacy policy" in their link text? What if they use "Legal" in their footers instead to link to the page where they place the privacy policy? What if I DO have a link in my footers with the link text "Privacy Policy" but it points to a page where I say " I think Google using privacy policies as a ranking factor would be absolutely absurd. Do you think Google would give me credit for having a privacy policy or not for the above text on a page named http://example.com/privacy-policy.html with a link in the footer of every page pointing to it with link text "Privacy Policy"? How the hell would they know whether it was a valid privacy policy or not? Oh... wait... next you're going to say Google's algorithm can read an interpret the "intent" and legality of written words? I doubt it. The ONLY way they could fairly implement this is by manual review... And that does NOT scale on the organic side. It likely barely scales on the Adsense/Adwords side of the house. That's just not how they typically "roll" over at the Googleplex. Next someone will be saying, "If you mention the word 'charity' on your site, Google will give you a boost in rankings!"
I completely appreciate where you guys are coming from, and I'm I'll be the first to say I'm not certain of anything, but what I am certain of is Google is not in the business of being perfect, and it's a stretch of the imagination that good is even trying to be "fair", they are in the business of being as good as they can be. They don't have to worry about the 3% of privacy policy pages that are bogus because 97% of them a quality. Google deals in aggregates, it's a machine, that's why so many people game it. So if google's research shows that sites that contain the words "Privacy Policy" on their site are better quality then they have every reason to integrate that factor into their algorithm.
How should the naming conventions be on the policy? I have a footer called Policy Agreement and the name of the page is policy.html, does it have to say private policy, or will policy sufice?
I'm new to all this but lets say we all decided we needed a privacy policy, it's likely that they would all be almost identical. Would you not then be penalised by google for duplicat content, just throwing it out there. Has any realistic wasy of testing this?
This is my point EXACTLY! Google wouldn't know Policy Agreement was a Privacy Policy. You guys can think what you want and continue to chase myths like this one. I will be at Pubcon in Nov and will ask Matt Cutts point blank about this. But I have never seen anyone reputable (at Google, Aaron Wall, Danny Sullivan, or other respected SEOs) even elude to such a thing. Until I see some kind of proof of this, I will call it a total myth at this point. Unlike most, I am fortunate enough to get to meet w/ teams from Yahoo!, Google, Microsoft, Ask every quarter. Our SEM teams have scheduled conference calls with each of them at least weekly, Google even more frequently. Google Webmaster Tools product team even reached out to me for a conference call on how to improve the Top Search Query page in WMT when they were working on redesigning Webmaster Tools about 6 months ago. So I hear things usually before it's in the public domain (like that Bing was coming 9 months before the release). And I've never heard even a whisper of this.