Yahoo’s Trustrank and the Importance of Authority in SEO
Saturday, October 17, 2009 11:52
Trustrank is a term introduced by Yahoo engineers which describes their algorithm that rates sites and pages on the grounds of relevancy and trust shown upon by other websites, similar to the Google Pagerank. The difference is, the Trustrank algorithm doesn’t solely count backlinks like how Pagerank does but it more or less puts weight on authority.
It may sound complex but ignoring the back-end and just taking into consideration what it can do is simple.
Take an example of Adobe.com being an authority site. If a site ‘a’ is being linked by Adobe.com i.e. Adobe.com has a link to site ‘a’ on it, then a portion of Authority is passed on to site ‘a’, now if ‘a’ links to a site ‘b’, some authority is passed on to site ‘b’. It means, Adobe.com is an authority site and it trusts site ‘a’, while site ‘a’ trusts site ‘b’. So the authority of Adobe.com is passed on without any loss to itself. Here ‘a’ receives more authority than ‘b’ and the level of authority passed on decreases on every level.
It is also believed that not just Yahoo but also Google makes use of rating particular sites as ‘Authority’ sites. The terminology maybe different but the basic idea is nearly the same.
Following are some of the factors believed to be the ones that are considered while rating a site as an Authority site:
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Backlinks : Links from other authority sites or being linked by such sites.
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Age of the domain :The older the better.
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Generosity : The site must link to many other relevant sites and must be content-rich.
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Bad neighborhoods : The site must keep away from linking to such sites under any condition.
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Social Media : Being all-around the social media sites. Being prominent on such sites with many votes does count.
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Niche : Should be away from topics like xxx, gambling, illegal activities, drugs, etc.
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Efficiency : The response speed, content i.e. amount of broken links and images and other faults with the server and scripts.
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History of the domain : Reputation of the domain, its past owners, past content and reputation.
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Brand : Does the domain promote a particular brand, i.e. is it owned by a brand and how dedicated is it to the products of that brand.
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Content : How frequently is the content updated.
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Security : Presence of SSL and determination of how safe safe the server and site contents are from hackers. e.g. DDos protection, etc.
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Size : how big is the site, how many pages, links does it have.
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Cluster : Whether the site belong to a cluster of similar sites having the same topic or it is unique.
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Server & I.p. : What kind of a server is the site hosted upon, shared, vps, Dedicated. Whether the i.p. address is exclusive just to it.
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Domain extensions : Some say it doesn’t matter but actually they do matter. .edu, .gov and .mil have a visible priority level.
These are most likely the aspects that are considered while ranking a particular site on the basis of authority by Search Engines and users too.
Many of the above points can be put into practice even by normal webmasters. Infact many of the white-hat SEO techniques automatically employ methods that make your site compliant with most of the above points, like detection of broken links and images, relevant and healthy linkbuilding, linking out to sites of similar niche, social bookmarking,etc. SOme of the above like checking Uptimes may not even be considered SEO but the fact is, everything and anything a search engine ‘may’ consider for ranking your site comes under the scrutiny of SEO.
So it can be observed that there are many points that can be put into practice so as to please search engines and their algorithms that may employ something like the ‘Trustrank’ algorithm. I’m not too much of a SEO super-wiz that i can confirm that all above points are accurate, but research and statistics shows that they are considered, maybe even in marginal levels. Anyways, employing the possible ones out of them will never hurt your site even if the benefits were negligible.
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