Trustrank: the less talked about SEO factor
June 20, 2008
Even though Keywords On Page and Links Off Page are the two most important variables that play out in SEO, there are other factors that the search engines take into account to decide on the rankings.
Some of them are only being figured out by professional SEOs.
The words “Trust” and “Trustrank” have been used a lot in SEO forums and blogs. The common consensus among SEO practitioners is that the accumulated trust on any given domain defines the ability that such domain has to rank on the search engines.
Conversely, the lack of trust means that the domain will have a tough time ranking for anything, even with the correct optimization in all other areas of SEO.
The million dollar question is then, how does a domain accumulate “trust”? These are some of the factors that seem to accumulate trust in a domain:
· The age of the domain
· The age of the links pointing to the domain
· The consistency and stability on the content growth pace
· The consistency and stability on the link equity growth pace
· The trust of the domains containing the links
The implications of the trustrank factor are huge for SEO. Among other things, it has pushed many SEOs into the art of Linkbait SEO, which is something we are going to talk in detail in future posts.
It also means that you can’t simply be as aggressive as you want to be on your SEO campaigns because there is a limiting factor, which is the trust accumulated on the domain that you are optimizing for.
Once reached the threshold, if you are still dissatisfied with the results there’s no much you can (on that specific domain) besides waiting patiently while you keep on accumulating quality content and quality links.
