All about TrustRank Algorithm!

TrustRank algorithm

Google registered the Trademark for "TrustRank" - a possible succesor to the existing PageRank valuation display method that has been said to seen it's end of live as it does not necessarly correlate with the search engine results for several months.

The TrustRank algorithm is a procedure to rate the quality of websites. The basic idea is similar to the PageRank algorithm - taking the linking structure to generate a measure for the quality of a page. The algorithm can be seen as a further development of the PageRank procedure.

Human editors help search engines combat search engine spam, but reviewing all content is impractical. TrustRank places a core vote of trust on a seed set of reviewed sites to help search engines identify pages that would be considered useful from pages that would be considered spam. This trust is attenuated to other sites through links from the seed sites.

Trust can be transferred to other page by linking to them. Trust is propagating in the same was as PageRank. Additionally one can select sources of spam. The negative measure (inverse PageRank) is propagating backwards and is a measure for bad pages (spam). For the ranking algorithm both measures can be taken into account.

TrustRank can be use to automatically boost pages that have a high probablility of being good, as well as demote the rankings of pages that have a high probability of being bad and help search engines identify what pages should be good canidates for quality review.

TrustRank is based upon good pages rarely link to bad ones. Bad pages often link to good ones in an attempt to improve hub scores, the care with which people add links to a page is often inversely proportional to the number of links on the page and Trust score is attenuated as it passes from site to site.
When deciding what sites to review it is mostly important to identify high PR spam sites since they will be more likely to show in the results and because it would be too expensive to closely monitor the tail.
TrustRank can be bolted onto PageRank to significantly improve search relevancy.


Web Spam with TrustRank

This one introduces TrustRank that has been developed to help fight web spam. Here's the abstract:

Web spam pages use various techniques to achieve higher-than-deserved rankings in a search engine's results. While human experts can identify spam, it is too expensive to manually evaluate a large number of pages. Instead, we propose techniques to semi-automatically separate reputable, good pages from spam. We first select a small set of seed pages to be evaluated by an expert. Once we manually identify the reputable seed pages, we use the link structure of the web to discover other pages that are likely to be good. In this paper we discuss possible ways to implement the seed selection and the discovery of good pages. We present results of experiments run on the World Wide Web indexed by AltaVista and evaluate the performance of our techniques. Our results show that we can effectively filter out spam from a significant fraction of the web, based on a good seed set of less than 200 sites.

The full text of the paper: Combating Web Spam with TrustRank is available as a 12 page PDF. It was co-authored by Zoltan Gyongyi (Stanford), Hector Garcia-Molina (Stanford) and Jan Pedersen (Yahoo!).

Brad Callen's Breakthrough SEO Elite Version 4.0!

The Internet's Most Powerful
SEO Software!
Get It Today!
Who is Brad Callen?

Related links:

Google AdWords pay-per-clicks FREE!