The Myth of Relevancy - Page 2

sponge06 · 02-26-2007, 05:02 AM

Trustrank is an old theory, but from my research it does exist. i don't think anyone knows the exact factors for gaining trust rank, but I dare say a lot of high quality links in a natural manner will certainly help.

John Scott · 02-26-2007, 05:32 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by sponge06

Trustrank is an old theory, but from my research it does exist.

As far as I can see you are the only one mentioning the TrustRank theory.

And specifically what type of research did you do to prove or disprove the use of TrustRank in the search algorithm?

And finally, the TrustRank algorithm is in no way, shape or form related to the use of the word "trust" as it has been used in this thread.

sponge06 · 02-26-2007, 05:36 AM

John posted:

Quote:

the main reason. Domain trust. Not so much about PageRank, but about trust established by links and age.

From my research Google gives a trust rating to each domain. This I believe is based on age, links, and generally avoiding penalties and appearing natural in your SEO efforts.

e.g Keyword spamming - may lose you trust rank. Getting lots of links with the same anchor text - may lose you trust rank.

We can call it whatever we want, but it is the principle of doing things naturally, focusing on quality and avoiding things that will get us penalised (lose trust)

John Scott · 02-26-2007, 05:40 AM

Quote:

From my research Google gives a trust rating to each domain.

I think that has been established beyond a doubt, but I am curious what type of research you did.

sponge06 · 02-26-2007, 05:48 AM

John, essentially I had a number of new sites and I built them up to a steady regular traafic (e.g 100 uniques per day from Google).

Then I used techniques such as getting hundreds of links in the space of one week from directories, adding lots of keywords to the meta description, building links solely to the homepage, doing link trades with non relevant sites etc.....

I did one of the above with each site, and on one of the sites I did NOTHING. After one month the site that had been neglected had the most traffic.

This is far from conclusive proof, but it may suggest that factors that may not be enough to get banned/penalised, may cause you to lose trustrank. So be careful and be natural in your SEO efforts.

Dean

seorender · 03-01-2007, 12:18 AM

Nice Informative Post, Thanks John!

sitetutor · 03-01-2007, 10:08 AM

It seems to me that there is something like 4 or 5 levels of trust, something like that. I may be completely wrong, but I have clients with new sites, old sites and sites which are 2 or 3 years old, something like that. Some sites I can create a page about anything and rank within a couple of days for some pretty tough keyterms on those sites. Other sites I can try as hard as I want, and nothing happens, then they start ranking for a few offbeat terms, then for harder keyterms etc.

Seems like there are many stepping stones with Google.

So do you guys see no major benefit in keeping content related?

IndigoBlack · 03-01-2007, 04:15 PM

There is benefit in keeping content related. If a person comes to your site looking for information on blogging and that's what your site is all about then yes probably most of your content should be about blogging. However, there is nothing barring you from talking about other stuff besides that. Talking about other subjects breaks up the monotony plus, if you are sharing personal stuff, I would imagine it would help your readers get to know you better.