I am reading a lot about Google Trust Rank these days. As far as I can see, all rumors, but important rumors. It may actually be a reason the the changes in PR we see these days. I have written together a few facts that I know: Google Trust Rank I would appreciate comments and would appreciate even more additional information and links about trust rank. Thanks, Rainer
So google is moving away from the algo's it has spent millions and billions of $$$ and now has real people awarding TrustRank instead ???? I see...........................
I still like that PigR description: http://www.google.com/technology/pigeonrank.html But I have to admit I think there is some truth in the trust rank rumor - you read so much about it and, at least to some extent, it makes sense ... on the other hand ... it doesn't Rainer
I have a feeling this will make people buy even more links on high PR (TR) pages. Sure it'll be harder to get a link on such a page but still not impossible and getting on one will probably have such a positive impact on ranking that people will pay a lot for it.
I tend to agree to Danny. Also, I'd like to say that my above quoted article has some false assumptions in it. I have done some thorough research and I am about to do a writeup about it. In the mean time, be warned about the original information Rainer
As promised, here is my new writeup on trust rank: Google TrustRank, Part II This time, I've done thorough research and, even though some guessing is involved, I trust the result much more. I even come to a conclusion on how it influences webmasters. An interesting one, I think As always, feedback is highly appreciated. Rainer
My feedback would be the last sentance of your long article is the only bit worth reading - namely "Content Is King" Nice link bait though Links and trust are not "new" news - Google gets better every day at this stuff So, from you article we have learned - nothing
I like how you have your adsense in your WP post. I want to do it similarly to that but haven't figured it out yet. As far as the content... as far as "Trust Rank" ... I really don't think they are ranking sites by humans in that way. It goes against their whole philosophy and it seems quite ineffective over the long haul.
Yes, I will say Google is getting better now, the only thing you can do is to show your best content.
No, not really. It's all a matter of the numbers. If the seed set is small enough (and it can be, as is detailled in the quoted scientific paper), then the cost of human review is well worth the result. Rainer
Hello, Rainer. It's jerry from syslog.org. Any chance they will use human input to "adjust" an algorithm - basically using humans to rate a small subset of automatic ratings?
Hi Jerry, glad to see you over here Keep in mind that nobody (at least not me) knows what Google actually does. If you look at the Stanford paper ... and think a bit ... I guess that the TR propagation will probably not be fine-tuned by human intervention, BUT I think that ongoing review will cause an ever-changing seed set, which in turn is used to change the flow of TR. To me, this looks like a very dynamic information flow, at least potentially. In practice, I still think it stays quite static, as the real trust anchors do not change that often. Depending on how bad trust is handled, I see a better chance for a large ranking change due to few review. I guess if a large spam network is human reviewed (or bought links on a formerly high-ranking site are detected), that could send shockwaves down to all sites that were depending on that sites trust... Rainer
I think this is a complete rumor. There is no scalable way to give trust rank to every site out there. Plus, this type of move would mean they would be openly displaying their policy on spam blogs, and adsense arbitrage sites. This will never happen. I think they have revised the PR system and we will all just have to wait to see where it vets out. I am thinking there will not be another change in Q4 as it is too close to the holiday season, but who really knows.
Well - I don't think it's just rumor. But as I have written, I think both TR and PR will go into the equation. And I do not expect that there will be any place where you can check your site's trust rank, so they will not openly display their policy. Of course, that's all my opinion. Rainer
Trust Rank is old news, sorry. Combating Web Spam with TrustRank: vldb.org/conf/2004/RS15P3.PDF (PDF) was written in 2004 and since then it has been assumed many times that Google is using that algorithm. Actually, it is not a completely manual method, but semi-automatic one. And one of its creators is Yahoo worker Jan Pedersen. It still uses internal and external link structure as the basic mechanism of assigning trust to a website. So nothing completely new. But Google is rumoured to soon use some semi-automatic approach both in pr algorithm and search engine results filtering. I think that's a good move.