Top Google Search Results-The Trust Factor
Where your site winds up in a Google Search is certainly not an exact science, unless of course you are paying for it. The determination of the organic results of a Google Search has long been the subject of intense study, analysis and debate. Google’s goal of fine tuning its’ search engine algorithms to produce the most relevant content to a Google Search query is constantly being challenged by those looking to manipulate the results for their own monetary gain.
What The Heck Is A “Petagig” Anyway?
For most of us, I think it’s very challenging if not impossible to really comprehend the massive amounts of data that must be tracked, ranked, and eliminated in order to achieve a relevant Google Search result. Yes, I’ve heard the numbers but they become so large that I’m now kind of desensitized to them. Just a couple days ago I heard the term “petagig” in reference to some humongous amount of information being generated daily worldwide on the internet. A “petagig” is a one with 15 zeros after it. That’s even more than the United States government is currently spending! (But I digress). It is hard for me to truly understand what a petagig is because there is nothing nor has there ever been anything tangible in my daily existence of that size that I am consciously aware of.
I even did a Google Search of petagig and the closest it could come up with was some photo albums with a title “peta gig”. Seems like even Google Search has a problem with a number that large! My point is that maybe sometimes we get too caught up in the numbers game. Don’t get me wrong, I know it is a top priority for every successful business to keep track of and be on top of all it’s numbers. But tracking numbers just for numbers sake is not what makes a business successful. What is more important is understanding the meaning of what’s behind those numbers.
For the most part, anyone that is concerned with where their website shows up in a Google Search has heard of PageRank. Google determines a value or degree of importance for a specific web page and comes up with a number between a low of Zero and a high of Ten. That number is referred to as the PageRank of that web page. PageRank is one of the main factors that goes into a Google Search result, but it is certainly not the only factor. PageRank is re-evaluated every few months by Google and depends mostly on the amount of links coming into your site, as well as the PageRank of the sites that those links come from.
Google Search Results = PageRank + TrustRank
In addition to PageRank, another concept that influences a pages Google Search result is TrustRank. There doesn’t seem to be any specific official definition of this term from Google itself. It is described as a link analysis technique in a Stanford University and Yahoo! research paperback in 2004 for semi-automatically separating useful webpages from Web spam pages. A Web spam page is basically a page created without any original relevant content with the goal of tricking search engines. Several different techniques are used , mostly for commercial purposes, to obtain a better-than-deserved Google Search result.
The only 100% truly reliable way to combat Webpage Spam is by having manual reviews and evaluations by human experts to determine a pages relevance. Obviously, with the amount of information and pages that hit the World Wide Web each day, it would take a “petagig” of experts to accomplish this and obviously be way too expensive…unless you’re the US government (but again I digress).
Top Google Search Results Includes TrustRank
The TrustRank concept is based on choosing a sample set of reputable webpages called “seed pages” that are reviewed by a human expert. After these “seed pages” are reviewed manually, a crawl is started that extends outward from the sample “seed page” set. This crawl looks for other related reputable and trustworthy pages. As the distance increases between the crawled pages and the sample “seed page”, set it’s level of TrustRank reliability decreases.
Bottom line, to achieve and maintain the highest possible result in a Google Search it takes both volume and quality from your backlinks to earn Google’s trust and blessing for your site. Some examples of site sectors that have high TrustRank backlinks would be government sites (.gov), education sites (.edu), top news sites, experts in a particular discipline, industry leaders etc.
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