What is the so-called TrustRank?
The TrustRank algorithm (trust = trust) evaluates the quality of websites. websites. With the TrustRank method, 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 from 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 by Zoltán Gyöngyi, Hector Garcia-Molina and Jan Pederson at Stanford in the form of “Combatting Webspam with TrustRank”. Until then, there was only one factor for assessing the quality of a website, the so-called PageRank. The TrustRank was developed to improve the quality assessment by defining certain highly trustworthy websites.
How does the 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 from PageRank, which is simply measured in numbers and is based on the link origin. The TrustRank allows better identification for search engines to recognize 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 “trusted” 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 pages link directly to spam pages. A selection of around 200 pages by Zoltán Gyöngyi, Hector Garcia-Molina and Jan Pederson can be found in this context. These pages have no spam and therefore have the highest TrustRank, Google and the above-mentioned trust these contents 100 percent. It is very likely that the sites listed include universities, open source projects and sites of public institutions.
All outgoing links are automatically recorded by these pages. Websites that have received a link directly from this trustworthy source are then placed one “hierarchy level” further down, but are also classified by Google as trustworthy, albeit with a slightly lower trust 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 and inherited from website to website. Conversely, if a page with a poor or lower TrustRank links to your website, this reduces the TrustRank of your website. The same applies if you link to a website with a poor TrustRank.