What is TrustRank?

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

Well, fewer and fewer people these days believe that page rank is very important. There are websites with low page rank but front page results in google and pages with high page rank that are not in the top 100 for their key phrases in google.

But it does remain a hot topic while TrustRank seems to be more secretive. The following is according to Wikipedia;

TrustRank is a link analysis technique for semi-automatically separating useful webpages from spam. (Gyöngyi et al. 2004)

Many Web spam pages are created only with the intention of misleading search engines. These pages, chiefly created for commercial reasons, use various techniques to achieve higher-than-deserved rankings on the search engines’ result pages. While human experts can easily identify spam, it is too expensive to manually evaluate a large number of pages.

One popular method for improving rankings is to increase artificially the perceived importance of a document through complex linking schemes. Google’s PageRank and similar methods for determining the relative importance of Web documents have been subjected to manipulation.

The TrustRank method calls for selecting a small set of seed pages to be evaluated by an expert. Once the reputable seed pages are manually identified, a crawl extending outward from the seed set seeks out similarly reliable and trustworthy pages. TrustRank’s reliability diminishes as documents become further removed from the seed set.

The researchers who proposed the TrustRank methodology have continued to refine their work by evaluating related topics, such as measuring spam mass.

Ok. I understand it completely now. NOT. So I decided to investigate some more to see if anyone else has more about TrustRank. I found this post at SEOBook.com ;

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 from pages that would be considered spam. This trust is attenuated to other sites through links from the seed sites.

Now I have another question about TrustRank rather than having more answers. According to Google, “No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google. Beware of SEOs that claim to guarantee rankings, allege a “special relationship” with Google, or advertise a “priority submit” to Google. There is no priority submit for Google.”

I understand there is no priority submit, it’s the part about “special relationship” that has me puzzled. If a “seed” site knew they were a seed site and know that links from them have added value to google, isn’t that in effect a “special relationship”?

SEOBook continues to explain;

TrustRank can be used to

automatically boost pages that have a high probablility 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 canidates for quality review

Some common ideas that TrustRank is based upon:

Good pages rarely link to bad ones. 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.

Trust score is attenuated as it passes from site to site.

So the idea that a “seed site” is trustworthy so anyone they link to must also be trustworthy is basically what TrustRank is all about?

Okay. I shoot pool really well. Therefore all my friends also shoot pool very well. I would never steal from anyone. Therefore everyone I know and talk to or do business with would never steal either. I’m sure there are better analogies, but you get the idea.

Someday I do hope google comes up with a system that works. Anyone else have more info about TrustRank? I’d love to learn more about it. maybe I’m wrong. You tell me.