The Trouble With TrustRank

As TrustRank grows in popularity, some glaring issues come to light.

What could go wrong with TrustRank

The most obvious error concerning TrustRank is what happens when you trust a domain too much and then the domain abuses that trust? The idea of giving some sort of blanket protection to all of the content on a domain seems counter-intuitive to the original intentions of Google. They had always been most concerned on a “by-page” basis. Now, they’ve shifted their focus to domain-wide “trust” which can be conferred on interior pages.

From the few public statements we’ve heard concerning TrustRank, we can gleam some details:

As the web grows in size and value, search engines play an increasingly critical role, allowing users to find information of interest. However, today’s search engines are seriously threatened by malicious web spam that attempts to subvert the unbiased searching and ranking services provided by the engines. Search engines are today combating web spam
with a variety of ad hoc, often proprietary techniques. We believe that our work is a first attempt at formalizing the problem and at introducing a comprehensive solution to as-sist in the detection of web spam. Our experimental results show that we can effectively identify a significant number of strongly reputable (non-spam) pages. In a search engine, TrustRank can be used either separately to filter the index, or in combination with PageRank and other metrics to rank search results.

TrustRank can be used to filter the index

It’s safe to say we’ve seen an increase in the use of TrustRank in recent months. Pages with low TrustRank tend to end up in the Supplemental Index, where they stay until incoming links from a source with decent TrustRank arrive to save the day.

More and more ranking problems can be explained away because of poor TrustRank.