Importance of trust as ranking factor for search engines.
Wrong email or password! Try one more time.

Forgot password?

An account with this email already exists.

An email with a confirmation link has been sent to you.

Did you forget your password? Don't panic. Enter your email address,
and we will email you a link where you may create a new password.

If this address exists, we will send you an email with further instructions.

Back to authentication

What does mean trust as ranking factor for Google?

What does mean trust as ranking factor for Google? - answered by Matt Cutts

Summary:

There is not something specifically called trust rank, in general it’s used in correlation to page rank. So Page rank is one of the trust-type algorithms. For that algorithms are used words like trust, authority and reputation which are trying to explain how much a site is considered of high quality by a regular user. Even you have a reputable site it’s also very important to have content which users are looking for; in that case you have a high a level of authority.

 

Matt's answer:

Great question. Trust is sort of a catch-all term that we use. So PageRank is the most well known type of trust. It’s looking at links and how important those links are. So if you have a lot of very high quality links, then you tend to earn a lot of trust with Google.

 

There are other signals. There are over 200 different signals that we use in our ranking. But you can kind of break them down into this notion of sort of trust and how well you match a particular query. So how topical you are. What’s your information retrieval score? Just on the merits of what the user typed in.

 

PageRank is one of the trust-type algorithms

PageRank is trying to figure out, we use several words: reputation, trust, authority. And it’s not that we have, or we have something specifically called authority rank, or something like that. We’re basically just trying to say, in the general scheme of things, how much reputation, or how much are we willing to believe that this is a high quality page, or a high quality site? Those sorts of things.

 

So in general, what you want to have is a very reputable site. But you also want to have a site that’s about, or a page that’s about, the topic that the user typed in. So in an ideal world, you’ve got both. It’s very high on the reputation scale, but it’s also exactly what the user was looking for in terms of typing in and finding a match for what they were typing. So we use a lot of different words like trust, reputation, and authority.  And Page Rank is a specific example of those sorts of things. But we mean it in a more general sense. It’s not, typically, a specific algorithm. It’s just trying to figure out how much, if a regular user saw this, maybe without even seeing a query at all, how much would they consider it a high quality page? How much would they consider it really useful, as far as being able to answer whatever questions that particular site was about? Hope that helps.

by Matt Cutts - Google's Head of Search Quality Team

 

Original video: