TrustRank is a concept for assessing how trustworthy a website is. The idea behind it is that trustworthy sites mostly link to other trustworthy sites. When a reputable website links to another page, part of that trust can be passed on.
The calculation is based above all on a website’s link structure. The closer a page is connected through links to high quality and trustworthy sources, the higher its TrustRank can be.
How does TrustRank work?
TrustRank first uses particularly trustworthy websites as a starting point. These often include large media sites, universities, public authorities or well known companies.
Starting from these sites, Google analyses which other websites are linked and how far they are from the original sources of trust.
Important characteristics here are:
- Quality of the incoming links
- Proximity to trustworthy websites
- Number of questionable or spam-like links
- How natural the link profile is
Websites with many links from spam pages or link farms, by contrast, lose trust.
Why is TrustRank important?
TrustRank helps search engines tell reputable websites apart from web spam. For SEO this means that high quality backlinks are considerably more important than a large quantity of low quality links.
A few strong links from trustworthy sites can often achieve more than hundreds of weak ones.