I have been told that having a privacy policy in the footer of your site helps improve your credability to search engines such as Google. Apparently Google will treat your site with more respect and therefore rank you better if you have a well produced privacy policy. Is this true in any way? Thank you
I have never heard of such a thing regarding organic search rankings at Google. How would they know it was a link to a privacy policy? Do you think they have people checking pages for this? It would be VERY difficult to automate and still be fair. What if I use the link text "Legalese" or something else to link to my privacy policy. What if I nofollow the links to my privacy policy? I think this is someone getting organic search confused with PPC, and the two are totally different. I think all adsense (and possibly adwords) advertisers are required to have a privacy policy on their pages but I have never heard of this being a factor for organic search. A LOT of mom and pop web sites and blogs do NOT have privacy policies and rank great. I would doubt very seriously if there were any truth to this for organic search.
It is true ... i can't find the link to the article right now in my comp but i'm sure they will trust you. I suggest you to make some modification to any privacy policy you find on the net to make it unique and G will be looking with other eyes on you
If you find this article please link it to this thread. This sort of stuff is fairly unknown and it would be good to have a full explanation of how it works.
Guys, Canonical hit the nail right on the head. If you don't want to believe him, that's fine. My upcoming personal site's revision will have a privacy policy, but it won't be for SEO reasons (because there aren't any) - it'll be for the peace of mind that it brings. I don't collect much, but I do gather things like IP addresses, hostnames, and of course email addresses and phone numbers. And I'll want people to know that information's far more secure than the Federal Reserve Bank of New York -- or Fort Knox, KY for that matter.
I read this also, i believe, on some level, that it can be true! Also talks about About pages, and contact pages
I never heard this. However, may be true as google looks for high authority. That would be plus point in google eyes.
Most of the sites that I have developed have a privacy policy and/or TOS that is bot-blocked in robots.txt. They do not have any apparent effect on rankings. As Canonical and Dan Schulz have pointed out, there is no reason to believe they would increase rankings. We almost need a snopes for SEO!
But you are throwing away PageRank rather than letting them flow through to those pages and get recycled back to the other pages they link to.
The Privacy Policy is not SEO but it is just for Google Adsense purpose.. If you have Privacy Policy in your adsense blog or website, you can have a better adsense value for you ads and most advertisers will trust to advertise on your site or blog. Additionally, google will pay your clicks and that adsense things as much as possible..
Actually, Adsense requires a Privacy Policy, though they refuse to provide one or say what should be in it. The reason is that Google is collecting data via the ad network on every visitor to the site. This, however, makes it mighty difficult for the webmaster to write a decent privacy policy since they have no control over what Google gathers or what they do with it. WE have chosen to punt, as it were, by including the following wording, "We have relationships with other companies that we allow to place ads on our Web pages. As a result of your visit to our site, ad server companies may collect information such as your domain type, your IP address and click stream information. For further information, consult the privacy policies of: http://www.google.com/privacypolicy.html The inclusion of the privacy policy has nothing to do with the amount one might make via adsense, except that the lack of a privacy policy could lead to one's termination from the program.
If it's a factor it's a very small factor. You see a lot of sites ranking without a privacy policy, and as Canonical suggested how can Google be sure if you have one.
This is the money line. Google factors into its rankings hundreds of different factors about your site, and it wouldn't surprise me in the least if having the term "Privacy Policy" on the site improved your rankings. However as dcristo said, just because it does help, doesn't mean it helps much, and in the big scheme of things there are just far more important things that a site needs before a privacy policy when it comes to ranking well in Google.