How Google Might Differentiate Between Trust and Authority

October 9th, 2008 by Ann Smarty | 5 Comments

A very insightful thread at WebmasterWorld discusses how Google might distinguish trust and authority notions and how they might influence the algorithm.

In a very summarized manner, the discussion resolves into the following:

Trust versus Authority

	Trust	Authority
Is based on…	A hand picked "seed list" of trusted domains" (see also "Trustrank")	Overall quantity and quality of inbound external links
Role in the algorithm	Protects you from "Google-bowling" campaign against your domain	Matters for rankings
Influence	Query-independent factor	Query- and topic-dependent factor
Attributed to	Domain	A page

This theory can be interpreted in several ways. We can differentiate between trust and relevance where trust is attributed to the domain whereas relevance comes from having backlinks from sites that have similar content who also have backlinks from relevant sites.

Other useful notions to consider are hubs and authority sites: hubs link out to a lot of authoritative documents and authority sites are linked to by a lot of authoritative documents.

Comments

5 responses so far ↓

randfish on Oct 9, 2008 at 10:23 am

Really good stuff, Ann (as always). When we built our trust-based algorithm on the Linkscape index, we found that it had a terrific predictive ability to differentiate high quality sites from low. Running a pure link popularity/importance algo like WebRank/PageRank/StaticRank/etc. would show a number of manipulative and spammy sites in the top echelons, but biasing through trusted sites using the principles of TrustRank was very revealing.

When we dive in, we’re looking at pretty much every domain under mozTrust (mT) 3 having some issues and everything over mT 6 being really solid. It’s not perfect by any means, but I think there’s great evidence from the data to suggest that engines would be crazy not to use it in at least some capacities.
Nick Stamoulis on Oct 9, 2008 at 10:08 pm

Great idea.. it does make sense! :)
Prestamos Personales on Oct 10, 2008 at 2:30 pm

great idea, so what you have to do is to have trusted pages on an aothority domain?
Jeffrey Smith on Oct 11, 2008 at 9:44 am

Ann:

Well spoken, building trust and authority is so important vs. just building links.

I feel like a broken record often echoed in our blog talking about authority (typically referred to as a nebulous or indistinct metric).

What would have taken pages to explain, you summarize perfectly with a simple diagram and three criteria/metrics (now that is optimization for you). Tedster does some mean research…

Rand, by the way, love what you have done with your new tool Linkscape (hat tip) :) you should be proud for taking such a bold vertical step in how SEO’s research websites.
SEO Mumbai on Oct 13, 2008 at 3:47 am

Ann your post was very useful to as to I got to know the difference between trust and authority, but I thing trust might be playing more important role in SE’s algorithm than only Protecting our websites from “Google-bowling” campaign against our domain. You should have written your post with more detail so that newbies in SEO field could understand that trust is more important than pagerank.