Jeff Woelker : Chicago SEO, SEM, and Social Media Consultant

Over the past year in the world of search optimization, a new term has arisen called “trust rank“. Before trust rank, there was page rank, which was a method used by search engines to determine the “rank” of a specific page in relation to others within the same site and across the internet. When it was first launched, page rank was thought to be the end-all be-all for rankings. If you got a high rage rank, you got high rankings. After a while, people started to game the system by linking high PR (page rank) pages to other high PR pages and it went up and up. Now Google, and eventually Yahoo and MSN, take into account “trust rank”, which is how trustworthy or reliable the neighborhood of information is.

Let’s take academia for example. If I compare two sites called www.healthcare.com and www.healthcare.edu, which do you think I would obtain the most reliable information? The .edu extension most likely means that it went through some kind of committee or standard which evaluated the information to make sure it was reliable and repeatable. The .com extension, although it may be identical to the .edu information, could have been posted by anyone, from anywhere in the world. Hence, the .edu extension is given more “trust”. The case goes with other large corporate websites or major news portals. A link from the Chicago Tribune is probably worth more than some random blog reporting chicago news. Why? Because the Chicago Tribune has an editorial staff, web team, copy editors, etc. etc. who all scrutinize and verify information that goes on their website.

So how does trust rank work?
So far as anyone knows outside of the major search engines, it’s pretty much all manual. I can assume that they have created automated processes to give certain extensions (.gov, .org, and .edu) extra points towards TR (trust rank) and then they are given more points based on manual verification of information on those sites. You can also think of it as “how difficult is it to get content published on this website?” If the answer is extremely difficult, most likely the TR is high, if it’s “anyone can do it” the TR is probably really low (I’m looking at you social networking.)

Know something I don’t or left out? Let me know in the comments.