Marketing Defined

Industry speculation whether Trust Rank has replaced Google Page Rank has surfaced yet again with the temporary disappearance of Page Rank from the Google Tool Bar [the Page Rank tab was greyed out for all web sites around Friday 27 May]

Will Trust Rank replace Google Page Rank?

SEO industry forums are tossing up between Google changing Page Rank as we know it to: Trust Rank.

Here is an excellent download of a whitepaper on Combating Web Spam with Trust Rank [PDF] - by industry experts: Zoltan Gyongyi and Hector Garcia-Molina [Stanford Uni - Computer Sciences]  and Jan Pederson [Yahoo Inc.]

What is Google Trust Rank based on - Does Trust Rank Exist?

Aaron Wall of SEObook so succinctly demystifies Trust Rank:

Human editors help search engines combat search engine spam, but reviewing all content is impractical.

TrustRank places a core vote of trust on a seed set of reviewed sites to help search engines identify pages that would be considered useful versus pages that would be considered spam. This trust is attenuated to other sites through links from the seed sites. [Definition: "Attenuation" is to "thin out" or "weaken"]

Aaron quantified that TrustRank can be used to:

• automatically boost pages that have a high probability of being good, as well as demote the rankings of pages that have a high probability of being bad.
• help search engines identify what pages should be good candidates for quality review

Some common ideas that TrustRank is based upon:

• Good pages rarely link to bad ones.  BUT… Bad pages often link to good ones in an attempt to improve hub scores.
• The care with which people add links to a page is often inversely proportional to the number of links on the page [Definition: Inversely Proportional is where a number either increases as another decreases... or decreases as another increases]
• Trust score is diluted as it passes from site to site.

To select seed sites Google looked for sites which link to many other sites.  DMOZ clones [low quality directory sites that resort to importing listings from the DMOZ directory] and other similar sites had created many non useful seed sites.

Sites which were not listed in any of the major directories were removed from the seed set.  Of the remaining sites only sites which were backed by government, educational, or corporate bodies were accepted as seed sites.

How to Maximize Rankings Using the Trust Rank Algorithm

Here’s a few pointers to get the maximum out of the Google Trust Rank algorithm:

• Getting targeted backward links from authority, industry related websites with skilful research prior to writing blog posts… which still remains the key to ranking highly at Google.
• Submitting your Blog and website to all the high ranking Directories - in particular directories like DMOZ and Yahoo [paid inclusion].
• Adding the “nofollow” attribute to the code of ALL outbound links on your webpages - particularly if you reference “low quality websites” in any blog post
• Being ruthless in refusing link requests from unrelated sites
• Stop using widespread Link exchange scripts commonly used by low quality sites [they leave a bad footprint in your code that Google will identify].
• Immediate deletion of SPAM trackbacks and comments in a blog…  taking the time to check that all comment links come from good quality sites, even if it means outsourcing the task [Update 2008: the Wordpress Akismet Defeat Spam Plug In is my new best friend]

Your views on the sudden disappearance of Google Page Rank and the Trust Rank algorithm and how  your websites have been affected are welcome… as always, in the comments field.