Stuff-Selling Entrepreneur>>Search engine optimization >>The Trustrank
As Google had been spammed using the Pagerank, they had to introduce a new algorithm named Trustrank , it is working since 2006,and makes it harder for the webmasters.
The idea of Trustrank is to reward webmaster for the good links, boost the sites of quality, and filter the spam. A good link uses to be more difficult to obtain than a simple blog comment, and the webmaster must be rewarded for obtaining one. On the other hand, if a web site has a lot of easy links, will be considered spam.
The Trustrank is secret, Google hired a lot of editors from different countries to find few good web sites and they named them ''seeds'' .the identity of the seeds is also secret, but they can be guessed, they use to have useful content in their context, are seasoned, and most of them end with the strings: .edu, .gov and .org.
When a seed links to another site, trespasses part of it's Trustrank (the effect is mitigated trough the websites), and the same happens with bad sites: they trespass negative Trustrank. So a web site is considered good until the sum of all the Trustrank received become negative.
The way this hurts a web site is the following: When the algorithm of Google detect a new page with negative Trustrank or with a lot of backlinks with the same anchor text, a red flag of spam is raised. This means that the site will appear very low in the results of Google for up to 1year, and in the case of that page reached an high Pagerank quickly, will be permanently banned.
In other words, if your page is suspicious, will be sandboxed. But if the spam is confirmed, you will be completely removed from Google.
Link Building Strategy
Despite the fear of a negative Trustrank, you may be wanting to grow, otherwise, without increasing your amount of backlinks, you will also be eventually penalized. Some tips you can use are the following:
Find sites ending with .edu, .gov and .org strings.
You can use Google to find sites ending with these strings and relevant with your web site. This can be done by searching a given keyword + the string site:.edu, site:.org or site:.gov, like in the image below:
The link directories.
A large part of the link directories has negative trustrank, specially these were you pay to submit your link without having to pass a review from an editor. but some other link directories like dmoz, yahoo and business.com are considered good. The same happens with the press releases, these PR where you only have to pay a one-time fee are bad, because they tend to accumulate a lot of links over time.
But the worst you can do is use a viral link generator of these that generate 10,000 links in a day, maybe you will get indexed veri fast as robots will find you easier, but you will rank very low in all queries and receive no Internet traffic at all.
Use Link harvester to find Trusted sites .
The link harvester, from seo book, is a program which list the backlinks of a domain, and classifies them by domain and string, this means that you will know if a web site is linked by .edu, .org and .gov sites, or is 100% linked by link directories. This tool will help you to guess the Trustrtank of a web site. You will also find it useful also if you want to know if you link building strategy is balanced.
