What is the so-called TrustRank?
The TrustRank algorithm evaluates the quality of websites. websites. In the TrustRank process, websites that are linked to by trustworthy sites are themselves classified as trustworthy. Spam pages on the other hand, are rarely or never linked to by trustworthy sites.
TrustRank is a Google algorithm that assesses the quality of a website and assigns it a more or less high level of trustworthiness.
How was TrustRank created?
TrustRank was created in 2004 at Stanford by Zoltán Gyöngyi, Hector Garcia-Molina and Jan Pederson in the form of “Combatting Webspam with TrustRank”. Up to this point, there was only one factor for assessing the quality of a website, the so-called PageRank. TrustRank was developed to improve the quality assessment by defining certain highly trustworthy websites.
How does TrustRank work?
In principle, the TrustRank algorithm works in a similar way to PageRank, as the focus here is also on recommendations, so-called links. These are determined differently to PageRank, which is simply measured in numbers; this is based on the link origin. TrustRank allows search engines to better identify spam websites. As with PageRank, TrustRank (and Reverse TrustRank) can be calculated at both page and domain level.
“The basic tenet of TrustRank is that the “good” and “trustworthy” pages of the web are closely linked, and that spam is much more prevalent outside of this “center”. By calculating an iterative, PageRank-like metric that only provides juice from trusted sources, a metric like TrustRank can be used to predict whether a website/page is likely to be high quality versus spam.”
Google determines the TrustRank by manually checking particularly trustworthy pages. This trust assessment is based on the assumption that it is highly unlikely that these sites link directly to spam sites. A selection of around 200 pages by Zoltán Gyöngyi, Hector Garcia-Molina and Jan Pederson can be found in this context. These pages do not contain any spam and therefore have the highest TrustRank; Google and the aforementioned trust this content 100 percent. It is very likely that universities, open source projects and websites of public institutionsare among the sites listed.
All outgoing links from these pages will continue to be recorded automatically. Websites that have received a link directly from this trustworthy origin are then one “hierarchy level” further down, but are classified by Google as just as trustworthy, albeit with a slightly lower TrustRank value. Each further “level” and thus each further removal of a website from the trustworthy origin pages reduces the TrustRank, here the removal of links is evaluated.
What effects does the TrustRank have?
The most important recommendations are simply intuitive, it is best to get links from websites with a high level of trust and never link to potential spam. This quality assessment of websites plays a major role in link marketing. For example, if you link a website with a high TrustRank to your website, this automatically increases the TrustRank of your website. It works like an inheritance, the TrustRank can be passed on from website to website and inherited. Conversely, if a site with a poor or lower TrustRank links to your website, this will reduce the TrustRank of your website. The same applies if you link to a website with a poor TrustRank.