Google Trust Rank

Posted by Rainer on November 13th, 2007 at 04:24pm

There is some rumor about a new Google algorithm (or call it parameter) named trust rank. In many webmaster forums it is claimed that Google will no longer actively develop page rank. The reason is that it is spammed to much. Instead of it, the new “trust rank” will be a premier factor in deciding which sites to put up first in the search engine result pages (SERPs).

Google’s trust rank is supposed to be awarded by humans, most probably Google employees.  It shall reflect the trust that Google has into a site. High profile sites, e.g. active gouvernment, educational or big-player company sites will probably receive a specific trust from Google. I guess it will be only awarded to the main site, and not any subsites of it. Otherwise it would be too easy to fool the new system, too.

For the same reason, I think that trust rank will most probably not be automatically passed on to pages that are linked by the trusted site. IMHO that would foil the approach to select what is really trusted and what not.

Also, if I understand the concept right, trust rank will probably assigned on a site-wide basis (e.g. www.example.com). I assume this, because if you trust, e.g. BBC, you do not need to verify each and all of its new pages. Plus, it would be impossible to do a human review of that many pages while it is a comparatively easy effort to check the trust level of a site at whole. This is a huge departure from the page rank concept, which was assigned on a page-by-page basis.

So is trust rank good or bad for you? It depends. It for sure benefits the big guys and I am tempted to say that it benefits the average Internet user. I may benefit web masters if the run a well established site with good content and reputation. I am just curios how much effort Google will put into finding those. Thus I am a bit concerned here … If you were used to push up your page rank for a non-quality site, trust rank will probably come very though after you. No wonder, because that supposedly is why it  was created.

Depending on how it is implemented, I am concerned that trust rank might shift the web to become more “big guy focussed”. In my worst thoughts, a view highly trusted sites will then probably serve the majority of search results, taking away a lot of our freedom in finding information that is not mainstream (sorry, I know I drive a bit into politics, but that needs to be from time to time ;)).

So I am watching trust rank very closely - not just in regard to search engine optimization and traffic building. Also, so far it is mostly rumors. I’ll try to investigate it further. Maybe trust rank is just another myth. Maybe (and this is more likely) it is a beast different from what we currently think it is. And, as always, Google doesn’t comment at all…

Oh, and an interesting site note: if trust rank is actually what we currently think it is, Google would give in to spammers. After all, Google was always proud to algorithmically (read: automatically) fight spam. If they now really need to resort to human review, that war seems to have been lost … And, yes, that’s one reason why I do not fully believe in the current rumors.

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