Google Trust Rank
What is Trust Rank?
Trust Rank is similar in application to Page Rank although different in application. Trust Rank is exactly what it says the trusted rank of any particular link. The more trust placed on a link the more benefit that it will pass on.
How does trust rank work?
Trust rank works just like Page Rank where each link has a value that it will pass onto the page it is linking to. From there those pages link to other pages which are also passed some of the PR from the page.
This propagates out through a huge network of links so that every site that has a link to it has some small amount of PR passed to it.
Trust rank works in this way except that the trust element is artificially given by people who assessed a range of sites and chose them as the trusted sources. They were assigned values and from the links they have Trust Rank is passed around all of the sites on the web.
Why do we care about trust rank?
Trust Rank is very important, it defines how often you will be crawled, how valuable your site is seen to be and ultimately determines to a fairly high extent, how well your site ranks. So Trust Rank is very important, much more important than page rank in fact. Page rank is a sign of Good SEO where are Trust Rank is required to have Good SEO.
What are the benefits?
The benefits are simply that your site will rank higher and become more popular. This is usually the aim of almost any webmaster or SEO!
What are the disadvantages?
There are none? OK will if you want to be picky the more Trust Rank, the higher SERPs, the more traffic which means you might have to pay a little bit more for bandwidth if you have loads of traffic. I am sure that for 99.99% of the web this is a very small price to pay!
How to find trusted links?
Wouldn't it be nice to have a Trust Rank toolbar? How about a nice little blue bar for Trust Rank along side the nice little green bar for Page Rank! Well I don't think we will be so lucky, although a Trust Rank toolbar element may not be completely out of the question.
So what things can we do to asses the trust rank of a site if we can't see our favorite little green bar? Well one thing that is likely to be very important is the age of the domain. The older the better! Check the domain history, make sure the site has always been on-line and was always the same type of web site. Check the domain is not black listed.
Have a look at all the back links to a domain (in Yahoo and MSN as well as in Google using the site command). Remember you are looking for quality no quantity. It is possible to have a high trust rank from only a couple of incoming links where as to achieve a high Page Rank you usually need lots and lots of incoming links with few outgoing links. Have a look at the sites that it is linking to, are they useful sites or are they affiliate / directory sites? Are they using lots of reciprocal links? You need to use your judgment here.
How to most effectively use links.
OK so maybe you need to link back to your web design company because its part of the deal. And I am sure there are several pages on your site like a contact page and other types of pages that don't make any difference to or help with your SERPs. What can you do to stop these sucking up Trust and Page Rank? Well that's easy, use the nofollow attribute.
By telling the search engine bot not to follow the link it knows that you can't vouch for the page so the link is not trusted and no Trust Rank will be passed. This also stops you losing trust rank. It is questionable if you should do this on your own site. If you can't trust a certain page on your own site why should Google trust any of them? Use the nofollow attribute only where appropriate but put it to good effect. Make sure your internal links are all pointing to relevant pages. This helps accentuate the value of the incoming link.