TrustRank - building trust around a website

Let us go back in time for a moment and, if you can, try imagining doing a web-search for a movie review or an audio player software anything goes here. You probably got some decent results then, I'm sure, but I'm also sure that the results also revealed some spam sites. As the Internet evolved, spam sources also evolved, making our quick-path to the desired result longer.

How can our favorite search engine, for example Google, not serve us any spam results when it's that easy going up in the results, thus making our path longer?

The PageRank

Google came up with a great way of fighting spam and getting them removed from the search results (placing them way back) in 1998 when Larry Page and Sergey Brin made their search engine so very popular with the usage of the PageRank algorithm. In essence PageRank is an algorithm that assigns a numeric value to a web-page based upon the number and value of incoming hyperlinks to this web-page, thus when you were conducting a web-search on the Google search engine it returned results ordered descendant by the PageRank value. Now at the beginning this was a really great idea and by using it, Google became the most popular search engine on the Internet. Nowadays PageRank, from my point of view and others, is beginning to be depreciated regarding low values. For example a PR of 4 is a normal level that usually makes your website stand out of the spam sites and its not very difficult to achieve. Now an over the 4 value PageRank is a more difficult task to achieve and this values make the difference between an established site and an “our personal photo album” site.

But what is there to stop a spam website that BUYS hyperlinks only in the interest of increasing his PageRank and maybe his search engine position?

Well actually getting yourself out of the spam/non-interesting websites is fairly easy nowadays, one only requires a decent amount of backlinks to get noticed and indexed by the search engines. Achieving a decent rank is fairly easy but from “decent” to playing with the “big guys” is a whole different story. This is where the real value comes forward, thus the TrustRank.

The TrustRank

Lets assume that you own a big chain of fast-food restaurants and someday a guy comes up to you asking if you could post his personal ad in one of your restaurants saying that he is selling used cars. Of course you would refuse, his ad has nothing to do with your restaurant and can not in anyway offer a better service to your customers. If say for example his ad was a real benefit for your customers you might just accept his listing on your ad wall and give him your small vote of trust in the mind of your customers. Now take this story and replace the restaurant with a big/established website and the ad with a link to a smaller website, I'm positive your getting the whole Trust idea.

The first mention of the TrustRank was in a paper by Zoltan Gyongyi, Hector Garcia-Molina and Jan Pederson 2004 –TrustRank(PDF).

The base principle of the TrustRank is placing a core vote of trust on a list of big/established sites that can be seeded over to other websites linked by the main list helping search engines decide if the listing in their results represent trusted and useful sites as opposed to spam/non-useful/irrelevant.

I'm positive you are familiar with the term web2.0 (if not familiar then it passed your ear sometime). In essence web2.0 is the Internet's revolution, news and general content gets noticed and trusted if other people notice and trust it. This is also the core of the TrustRank, machines can never decide by themselves if a website is useful or not without the prior programing of a human being. The top list of pre-trusted websites that share TRUST are human maintained and generally only accept valuable and useful links to information (other websites). One other special purpose of the TrustRank is reviewing high PR pages and deciding witch to remove and witch to bump up the search engine results.

The main reason I came to the decision of writing this was my long search of pros and cons in paying the review fee for listing in the Yahoo! Directory. I don't know if this may come as a surprise for you but getting a review of acceptance in the Yahoo! Directory costs 299$ speeding up the process to 7 working days.

Do not buy links

Going back to the TrustRank, Yahoo! and DMOZ can be considered two of the main trusted sites making up the list of pre-trusted sites, and this is because in order for a website to be accepted it has to be review and accepted by a human being, an objective and competent editor that can clearly differentiate a useful site from a bad one.

As I've read in different places (http://www.webmasterworld.com/yahoo_search/3353143.htm) a listing in the Yahoo! Directory doesn't get you real valuable traffic for your money but “Passing the review process of the Yahoo directory says something positive about a website”, witch I consider building TrustRank.

Subscribe now via RSS feed and get all the new tutorials