Google applies a “trust rank” to websites that are using search engine optimization techniques in order to rise in the search results. It shows how much Google trusts both the relevance and authenticity of a given website or web page. Good link building, for example, shows Google that your website is relevant to its primary subject or service and your trust rank will rise.

Because your link profile is one of the most important factors when it comes to improving your rankings for your chosen keywords, it is vital to always be improving the factors that influence your link profile. Keep in mind that Google not only takes the number of links into consideration, but the actual relevancy (i.e. if it happens to be from a page with a similar topic, or whether uses any relevant keywords in its anchor text), as well as what value they have placed on that linking page.

When most people go about link building they will usually ignore the importance of quality links, many people simply look at a link as a link and go for quantity over quality. This is the wrong way to go about link building, the main aim for successful link building is to get some from ‘authority’ sites, these are sites that have a high Google rank and a high trust rank themselves, an authority site link is worth more than many irrelevant site links. Authoritative back links from places such as top educational websites, Government sites, news portals, and other popular expert websites are the types of sites you want to aim for when link building. But again, similar topic, content or services matter, Google can actually spot irrelevant link building. So just trying to get links from big, popular websites with high trust rankings will not work, it will actually make your SEO less effective. SEO techniques simply are not that black and white, Google and many other search engines have a bevy of complex analytics and algorithms in place to ensure that search results are relevant to users.

The relevancy of your pages to the rest of the website, the quality of your keywords, and even how long your domain has been registered for all factor into your Google trust rank. Your entire website is scrutinized by Google’s methods, it is believed they keep a record of these trust rank measurements over time so that an ideal trust rank can be generated for every page of your site. With this in mind, you should be able to use smarter SEO techniques in order to keep your website high up in Google’s search results.