subject: Google Trust Rank - The Affect It Has On Your Rankings [print this page] Google Trust Rank - The Affect It Has On Your Rankings
Google applies a "trust rank" to websites that are using search engine optimization techniques in order to rise in the search results. It shows how much Google trusts both the relevance and authenticity of a given website or web page. Good link building, for example, shows Google that your website is relevant to its primary subject or service and your trust rank will rise. Because your link profile is one of the most important factors when it comes to improving your rankings for your chosen keywords, it is vital to always be improving the factors that influence your link profile. Keep in mind that Google not only takes the number of links into consideration, but the actual relevancy (i.e. if it happens to be from a page with a similar topic, or whether uses any relevant keywords in its anchor text), as well as what value they have placed on that linking page. When most people go about link building they will usually ignore the importance of quality links, many people simply look at a link as a link and go for quantity over quality. This is the wrong way to go about link building, the main aim for successful link building is to get some from 'authority' sites, these are sites that have a high Google rank and a high trust rank themselves, an authority site link is worth more than many irrelevant site links. The kinds of sectors that have a reputation for authoritative backlinks are industry leaders, education sites, experts in specific fields, government sites, and top news portals. Obviously, these are the types of sites that will help raise your trust ranking, so your goal should be to gather as many links as possible from sites like these. However, when it comes to SEO, things are not that simple. Google has made it known that they watch for any evidence of link building that does not look natural, so be careful not to build links too fast, or have links that seem to come from the same group of sites. In addition, factors like your domain's age and how long it's been registered, keywords, relevancy of pages, and your site overall are incorporated into your trust ranking. It is believed that Google tends to keep records of a few of these various trust rank measurements for a certain amount of time to be able to continue comparing what they find about your site. This way they are able to offer up a realistic trust rank for each and everyone of your pages.
