How does Google measure trust?
This question goes to the heart of what we do. You already know the short answer: Google uses more than 100 different factors, including the PageRank algorithm, to determine whether a site is trusted or reputable. If you think of the internet as a democracy, a web page that links to another page is “voting” for the value of the page. As we explain in our Technology Overview, PageRank interprets a link from Page A to Page B as a vote for Page B by Page A. PageRank then assesses a page’s importance by the number of votes it receives. But that’s not the end of the story. If Page A itself has more votes from other pages, the vote carries more weight. Or to put it another way, if more people trust your site, your trust is more valuable…more
This idea, as now acknowledged publicly by Google itself, echoes the notion of the Trust Vote, as I had described it previously on dotxxxblog.
Read: Combating Web Spam with Trustrank
June 15th, 2006 at 2:19 pm
[…] Google has been working hard to improve the quality of its search results with, among other efforts, the institution of Trustrank. Now that trust factors figure into determining which organic listings Google displays on its results pages, relevancy and searcher satisfaction are increasing dramatically. The inevitable consequence of this is a reduction in average search time and a reduction of advertiser impressions per search. Fewer impressions sounds like a bad thing for advertisers, but it’s not… more […]