Trust Rank and Themed Link Building

While hard to find any data directly from Google utilizing this exact term, it is known that this term is trademarked by google and they publicly discuss “trusted” sites. Matt Cutts has acknowledged the TrustRank presence in the search engine title for this google librarian page and gives a very brief idea of what they mean by trusted site.

Matt Cutts:

"This question goes to the heart of what we do. You already know the short answer: Google uses more than 100 different factors, including the PageRank algorithm, to determine whether a site is trusted or reputable. If you think of the internet as a democracy, a web page that links to another page is "voting" for the value of the page. As we explain in our Technology Overview, PageRank interprets a link from Page A to Page B as a vote for Page B by Page A. PageRank then assesses a page's importance by the number of votes it receives. But that's not the end of the story. If Page A itself has more votes from other pages, the vote carries more weight. Or to put it another way, if more people trust your site, your trust is more valuable."   - End Matt C. Quote

The value of a link is increased if it comes from what Google refers to as a trusted source. You can see this clearly stated in Googles Patent Applications DOCUMENT SCORING BASED ON DOCUMENT CONTENT UPDATE.

Examples of trusted sources stated in the patents are .gov sites and sites that have established high credibility in the marketplace such as amazon.com

The idea around this is that trusted authority sites will have more weight in their link because the probability that a searcher will follow links and arrive at this site as a source for information. These large sites have so many others that link to them as a source for information as a resource- and this often increases their "value" relevance to the end user.

The definition of value in U.S. Pat. No. 6,285,999 yields a page rank that increases as the number of backlinks increases. But also considers the following:

“a citation from a highly ranked backlink as more important than a citation from a lowly ranked backlink (provided both citations come from backlink documents that have an equal number of forward links). In the present invention, it is possible, therefore, for a document with only one backlink (from a very highly ranked page) to have a higher rank than another document with many backlinks (from very low ranked pages).”

Google states in this U.S. Pat. No. 6,285,999

“Estimating the importance of each backlink to a page can be useful for many purposes including site design, business arrangements with the backlinkers, and marketing. The effect of potential changes to the hypertext structure can be evaluated by adding them to the link structure and recomputing the ranking.”

By delving further and researching, the patents it becomes clearer that TrustRank is determined by on site and off site factors.

Trustrank factors include things like:

• the location of the link on the posting sites site and page.
  
  
• the proper coding for that page html, xml etc.
  
  
• the content that surrounds the page where your link is coming from and the page where the link is going to.

Having a link from another well siloed site that clearly gives the layout of the “neighborhood” is valuable to you. And since google is using some of these trusted sources as seeds for it’s new semantic web based directory – Major and Trusted Niche Directories are very important (and number one on the to do list in the strategies that follow).

• Are you paying for the link or is it being placed for free (this we will go into a bit more later)
  
  
• Is the domain purchased by the business for a longer duration of time like 10 years- indicating they are in business for the long haul.
  
  
• It also includes the age of the data – the site and the content.

Fresh content is usually considered more relevant. And sites that have been online and appearing in themed queries over time carry more weight.

However in some cases Google may determine that a certain topic of queries relies on as a useful resource more aged data and will factor age of content as a positive when determining the results to deliver. You can clearly see the fine-tuning that is occurring in the Google algorithms.

You want to be in business and keep fresh content moving. 

The web is dynamic not static.

And while some static data or content may be useful, careful placement and linking strategy of non-dynamic content in your own sites architecture is an important strategic business decision in order to balance all three legs of the website success stool.

• Google engines determine "trustrank" by looking at a sites growth overall if it is adding new content, updating existing content if relevant to do so – in FAQ’s or data that updates yearly, is growing in forward and backward links, and increasing traffic.
  
• Trustrank is also increased when following basic parameters originally laid out in the Google Patent Method for node ranking in a linked database that was originally filed in 1998. Have your links come into your site from different web servers and from a variety of geographic areas and authors. This will occur naturally as you implement your linking campaign properly by using the different strategies presented in this course.

Developing a marketing/link building plan allows you to run your business strategically while also building a structure for new content when your comapany changes directions or  adds new products.