Many business owners tend to look at Google's search algorithm as a mysterious "black box" whose inner workings can never be known. But Google is surely measuring something, or else it would return nothing but gibberish every time you hit search. And the SEO community is constantly trying to figure out what that something is — the ineffable Right Stuff that causes one site to thrive while another sinks. As a result there are countless dubious theories floating around at any one time about how this stuff is measured, but one thing most people agree on is what the stuff is called: TrustRank.
Now stay with me here, because this is where it gets a little technical. TrustRank is based on something ELSE called PageRank, which is the name for the original algorithm that Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin devised back in 1998. These two young computer engineers were trying to answer a simple question: how can you determine the value of a Web page without falling for tricks and gimmicks?
PageRank was their answer. They created a program that generated a map of the entire Web and then ranked every page based on two things: the number of inbound links it had, and the popularity of the sites supplying those links. The more links your site boasted, and the more popular the linking sites, the better. It was an elegant solution that proved enormously successful, helping Google rise to its current position of near world domination.
But PageRank had a fatal flaw. Once webmasters figured out that links were the key to higher rankings, they began buying and selling them in a mad gold rush. An entire cottage industry sprung up overnight devoted to tiny blue snippets. Before long, the Web was overrun with so-called "link farms" — huge portals that sold links by the thousands to enterprising webmasters looking for some attention. And just like that, the companies with the deepest pockets began to buy their way to the top of the search results.
Google, needless to say, was displeased. Can you blame them? Here they had devised the first true democratic way of ranking the Web, and now that age-old corrupting force — money! — was rendering the whole process incoherent once again.
Clearly it was time to regroup. Google felt certain that links remained the best way to gauge a site's relevance. But if links could no longer be trusted, how would the system ever work? The answer: devise a way to distinguish between commercial links and earned links.
Thus was born TrustRank. TrustRank works in essentially the same as PageRank did, with one key difference: any site suspected of buying or selling links gets penalized and sent to the netherworld of search results. When this revised system was introduced in 2007, the link farms and their clients plummeted in the rankings overnight.
And that's not the worst part. Sites that no longer pass along any trust are still never told of their exiled status, so webmasters continue to buy and sell links in a doomed effort to game the system. Google even went so far as to release a handy PageRank browser plug-in that supplies a meaningless PageRank value for every site you visit. But make no mistake: this is all misdirection to distract you from the one secret that Google will never tell you, namely which sites still possess, and can pass along, TrustRank.
What is the moral of this story? The only links that will always bring you better search rankings are those that are earned. Earned links are the key to proving that your site is genuinely relevant, which is precisely what Google wants. And the only way to earn those links is with great content, and constant outreach.
High-quality, optimized content never goes out of style. Do you want to learn more about how to improve your website's quality? Contact the SEO content experts of Breakthrough Content today.