Comments on: Six Degrees of SEO Separation : Can We Reverse Engineer TrustRank and Hilltop?

By: Antony

Antony — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 15:45:50 +0000

I like this post and I’ve tried to research how Moz/Trust Rank is formed, however to no avail.

How do you propose using Yahoo site explorer to find outbound links from a site? I know it can be done with Bing, but I’m unclear on Yahoo.

By: Gab Goldenberg

Gab Goldenberg — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 20:07:26 +0000

@Terry – thanks for the links and constructive criticism.

@Sean – Thanks for clarifying what I was getting at. I didn’t mean to say that the TLD alone carries more weight – Matt Cutts busted that myth a while back – but that on the whole, they tend to be linked by trustworthy places and link to trustworthy places. Plus I imagine that the Ivy League has a few sites in the seed set…

@Vin Neat tip! I’ll be sure to use that next time around :).

By: Sean Weigold Ferguson

Sean Weigold Ferguson — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 19:25:34 +0000

Terry,

I don’t think anyone here is implying that .edu and .gov links carry any extra authority based on their TLD. Even if it were true, it would be extremely difficult to prove.

What we do know is that on a macro scale .edu links tend to carry more trust/authority in comparison to an “average” link with a different TLD. The correlations are pretty irrefutable regarding this (not to be confused with causation).

As to why this is the case, I can only speculate. My guess is that .edu domains are generally considered trustworthy for more reasons than just the TLD. Whether the TLD is even a factor at all is certainly up for debate.

By: Vin

Vin — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 18:33:03 +0000

I think a lot of people missed the point on this. Gab, I think this is a brilliant way to explain trust to the non-SEO as well as to approach link building.

A good exercise: use the “~” query for your top 10 or so short-tail keywords. Use the sites that show up in the top 1 or 2 as your Kevin Bacons and then go start building links.

By: Terry Van Horne

Terry Van Horne — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 12:41:35 +0000

A site… is a site .gov and .edu have no more value in authority terms than any other site due to TLD. It is myth that these are “special” beyond the fact that the research done by Universities is often cited in other authority documents. So, IMO, if you want to prove that it is easily skewed by the document set. I have a site that is over a decade old and has .edu links. It had more but… people remove links when info is very old.;-)
I’ve never seen this so called automatic authority. Despite having links that are over 12 years old and worked with sites that had lots of .edu.

IMO, the value of the authority of .edu and .gov in PageRank terms is the value the page has in PR Terms. Whether the green pixels or another value only the eggheads on the GooglePlex would know.

Gab, your article outlined a good way to gather intelligence I’m only negative toward the impression given that .edu and .gov have any added value based solely on “TLD”. Sorry… gotta’ call BS on that. One should watch who and where they get their information… it goes a long way to perpetuating the myths. ;-)

By: Terry Van Horne

Terry Van Horne — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 12:00:18 +0000

TrustRank:
http://www.vldb.org/conf/2004/RS15P3.PDF

By: Terry Van Horne

Terry Van Horne — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 11:14:21 +0000

The original Hilltop papper was on the UofT site written by Krishna Bharat and seems to be moved here http://ftp.cs.toronto.edu/pub/reports/csrg/405/hilltop.html
from the original location

By: Debra Mastaler

Debra Mastaler — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 01:26:44 +0000

Can you provide a link to the TrustRank paper/algorithm written by a search engine rep? Links to both the Hilltop paper and Trustrank link to SEO columns. Thanks!

By: Arnie K

Arnie K — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 23:00:56 +0000

Obviously it is all about trust. We use Linkscape a lot for this and very glad to hear Rand is going to improve it as we see it has some deficiencies.

By: Gab Goldenberg

Gab Goldenberg — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 21:21:35 +0000

@Brandon & @Sean – Thanks for your insights guys. I agree that it is skewed, which is a problem. And I’m pleased to hear that your .edu and .gov experiences reflect what I had kinda expected.

@Michael – I’d love to here more from you as to what problem(s) you have with this technique. I’m sure someone knowledgeable like you has some valuable constructive criticism to make :).

@Rand thanks for clarifying! I’d love to hear more about those conversations the next time we cross paths in person :).