More than two years have passed since the release of the TrustRank foundation paper, yet even today, more than two years later, no one outside the realm of online marketing world knows what it is. The first idea was simple and actually only a few lines.
Fighting Spam Web with TrustRank. Technical report, at Stanford University, 2004
Spam web pages use a variety of strategies to reach higher levels of search engine results. Although human experts may not be able to detect spam, it is very expensive to personally scan a large number of pages. Instead, we suggest ways to automatically separate decent, beautiful pages from spam. We begin by selecting a small set of seed pods to be examined by a specialist. Once we have identified reputable seed pages, we use a web link structure to find other pages that may be relevant. In this paper we discuss possible ways to use seed selection and the availability of good pages. We present the results of tests conducted on the World Wide Web identified by AltaVista and evaluate the effectiveness of our strategies. Our results show that we can effectively filter spam on a critical part of the web, based on a good seed set of less than 200 sites.
Original document http://dbpubs.stanford.edu:8090/pub/2004-17
I will try to explain in layman's terms what this is all about.
First of all you will need to understand about the harps and sites of the authorities in the eyes of Google. Sites and pages are included Phrase and title as part of the Google web map. In these collections Google will identify its current locations and authorities. Site hub links to multiple sites within that collection, and authorities are sites within that group that get more links to it than others.
Google will already evaluate these sites for their own content, links and reliability.
A good example would be the BBC. They have a solid set of guidelines that editors must follow to link websites to the web. They also have strict guidelines set and overseen by designated government agencies. These seed sites will be provided with a trust factor that can be transported (or voted) to other sites, (such as page rank) through its links.
Many reputable niche sites will handle links to the same content, or links to the same content. E.G. Reuters may run a news line, taken by the BBC rewriting and quoting Reuters's first report. CNN may cite a more advanced BBC version. ALL of these sites are linked, and all are trustworthy sites. All may also link to a website that contained white paper / suspicion / content.
So let's use it.
I am releasing a well-received niche altruistic website. The news is being intercepted by the BBC. Various other news sites take over and point links to my niche site. Over time other charitable and educational sites have contacted me, as well as church sites etc. Many of these sites will be trusted seed sites or linked to seed sites. The closer a link to a site comes in, the more TrustRank will help my altruism site benefit, the less it grows. ), I may be a trusted hub myself, making links to my site more valuable (according to TrustRank not money, although this will be the case, but no one will know TrustRank to know the value)
If you want to see a dirty version of trustrank working, check out the voting system at the forum.
If someone with a red (bad) name is voting for you (good or bad), it does not affect your reputation, because in the eyes of the program they are not trusted because some TRUSTEES have said so. Although a vote (good or bad) from someone with a lot of celebrity squares can lift you up, or throw you in the furnace, while votes from those with one or two celebrities will count, but not much. This is a simplified version of TrustRank.
It is my belief that TrustRank will integrate so that the total amount of everything is greater than the components. so if a site receives links from a seed site it can cost x, but a site with links from two seed sites can be a combined trust value of x + y +.
Below is a graphic illustration of how it might work, but I did not add up the sum, and used round numbers. Google PageRank uses a total of 1 total as a basis for each page, and a ‘voting value’ of .85 of the PageRank value. (This is the result of .15 factor dampening that applies to all pages when determining the number of outgoing links on a page).
http://www.umbrella-consultancy.co.uk/tr1.jpg (image address)
That’s my take on TrustRank. So the old adage of quality content that people will want to link to means more than ever before.
Lastly, in life there is a balance, in every black light chart, in every white Stetson, there is black. If some sites are trusted, either by seed or by seed authorization, others will NOT be trusted. So is it possible, that links from unreliable sites (because TrustRank sites are anonymous), may not receive any link benefits that you will transfer? Just a theory.
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