OWG's Nutshell Trust rank

First of all you will need to understand hubs and authority sites in the eyes of Google. Sites and pages are clustered by Phrase and topic as part of the Google web mapping. Within these clusters G will identify its current hubs and authorities. Hubs being sites that link out to many of the sites within that cluster, and authorities where the sites within that cluster link to it.

Google will then manually rate these sites with regard trusted content and their trustworthyness.

A prime example would be the BBC. they only ever link out to on topic, hand selected sites (like my rugby forum ) sorry I couldn't resist, sometimes it pays to have friends who also edit for the beeb LOL

More seriously. These seed sites will be given a trust factor which can then be carried (like page rank) through their links.

Most niche trusted sites will carry links to similar content, or links to links on similar content. E.G. Reuters might run a news line, that is picked up by the BBC who rewrite and cite the original Reuters report. CNN might cite the BBC version which is more developed. ALL these sites are interlinking, and all are trusted sites. They might all also link to a website that originally carried the white paper/ allegation/ content.

So lets put it into practice.

I release a niche altruistic website that is well received. The news gets picked up by the BBC who link to it. various other news sites pick up on it and also point links to my niche site. In time other charity and educational sites link to me, as well as church sites. Many of these sites will be either seed trusted sites or linked to by seed sites. The closer the incoming link to my site is to the seed site, the more trustrank my altruism site will get. The further away, the less. By default, if my trustrank hits a level, I might well become a trusted hub. Making links from my site very valuable (in terms of TR not monetary, although this will also be the case, but no one will know the TR to know the value)

Trust rank will (IMO) compound so that the sum of the whole will be greater than the parts. so if a site got links from a seed site it would be worth x, but a site with links from two seed sites could be x +y + compounded trust value.

That is my take on trustrank. So the old adage of build quality content that people will want to link to, means more than ever now.

One last thing, in life there is balance, for every shard of light there is dark, for every white stetson, there is a black un If some sites ARE trusted, either by seed or approval of seed, then some will NOT be. It is therefore possible, that links from untrusted (due to being unknown) sites, might not get any link benefit to pass on? Just a theory.


H0ope that explains it a little better.

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