TrustRank – how does it influence your website position?

What is TrustRank and how does it work?

It was originally developed by Yahoo! And Stanford University in 2004.

Therefore, it limits your exposure to websites that contain duplicate, worthless or even harmful materials. The effect is to give each website a certain level of trust. The higher it is, the higher the page is in the Google’s ranking for given search results. TrustRank is not only algorithm used by Google. The biggest one is PageRank without doubts, but its purpose remain the same.

How does Google define „trust” in the website?

There are over 200 factors that the search engine takes into account when determining the level of trust in the website. One of the most important one is the presence of high-quality links (and therefore links to other highly trusted pages, e.g. to our website). The reasoning briefly assumes that if multiple websites refer to one which is the source of information (or those with an overall high level of trust among Google’s algorithms), then the one is most likely to be trustworthy. If the majority of hyperlinks lead to websites being spammed, then it will not be included in such qualitative group.

What could be improved to obtain a higher TrustRank?

While the exact list of factors that Google takes into account is not public, there are a number of empirically validated methods that can help your website gain higher position in the trust ranking. We will go through them below.

Optimization of elements placed on the website

First of all, take care of the already mentioned links. Having to many links to large, popular pages on your website will definitely increase the credibility of the algorithm’s estimates. Besides, not only the readers (whenever they see references to things they know in the text) will find your website quite a reliable source.

Of course, it might not be possible to get a link from some big, popular website directly to yours, but there is a way. Google also looks favorably at links to websites with links to largest ones. So, you may not be able to get a hyperlink to your site directly from a trusted site, but you can still get it from the website it links to.

Remember about including all the necessary information about cookies, privacy settings and terms of use. This is the requirement for every major site, and meeting the conditions is a testimony that we are dealing with a party that can process data in an appropriate and trusted manner.

If you run a blog or post new content regularly on your website, be sure to include the list of sources you used when you have been creating content at the end.

Develop your own brand

Algorithms pay attention to a number of issues that are, by definition, determinants of the brand. Brands can be trusted. Therefore, take care of a short and substantive name of your website and be sure to add a subpage „About us” with detailed information describing your activities. If you have not got it yet, be active on social media like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. It is also worth placing anchor texts with the name of your brand between blocks of texts and maybe on the other websites.

Take care of your domain

Register your domain for a longer period of time – this is determinant of investment in the development of the website. Such information should be public so that it can be verified.

We hope that this tutorial will help everyone improve their website’s position in the search engine rankings. This issue is definitely comprehensive, but matching it to the requirements of the algorithms is most often impossible. However, the stages mentioned above will certainly be used to increase the overall trust in your website.