Google Trustrank Is On The Loose

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People have spoken about Trustrank for quite some time, and it isn’t hard to believe that Google is using it these days. Almost every search you conduct in Google now shows a Wikipedia page in it. It appears that Google implicity trusts just about any page on the entire domain of Wikipedia.

Trust is great, but what happens if the big domains start abusing it?

This is the seed of destruction buit into the whole concept. Trust is great, but if the webmaster realizes he can rank for nearly any term, then undoubtedly, the more corrupt ones will succumb to the pressure of providing results for others for cash. That’s the same basic reason that Pagerank eventually became more suspect as time went on.

A single domain probably isn’t always the right choice for every question

To think that Wikipedia ALWAYS has the best answer for every search is questionable, to say the least. Many Wikipedia pages will show up anyways, because of their external link references, so giving a domain-wide “boost” to the pages because of another factor might be overkill. If Wikipedia starts appearing in every position, then the only volunteer editors there will be SEOs.

This means WE need trust, too

For the rest of us out there (the ones who don’t have millions of incoming links like Wikipedia), we’ll have to concentrate particularily hard on maintaining our own credibility. Otherwise, we might slip so far below the criteria for the algos that our websites slip in the rankings. How can we build trust? Deep-links to our interior content pages seems to be one way, if not the absolute best way.

Deep interior pages which our content heavy (landing pages), with perfectly targeted anchor text still seem to get the job done. And the more the trust of the linking page, the better results for the linked to page. We just have to keep on working to keep our trust increasing.

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