First we need to know the difference between Authority and TrustRank.
Google has two completely different metrics going on. As you can see from the reference to Larry Page's original patent, authority in Google's terminology comes from backlinks. When lots of other websites link to your website, you become more and more of an Authority Website. So, there's your Authority Website.
But that isn't to say you've got TrustRank. So what exactly is TrustRank? Here's a definition from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: " TrustRank is a link analysis technique described in a paper by Stanford University and Yahoo! researchers for semi-automatically separating useful web pages from spam.
Many Web spam pages are created only with the intention of misleading search engines. These pages, chiefly created for commercial reasons, use various techniques to achieve higher-than-deserved rankings on the search engines' result pages. While human experts can easily identify spam, it is too expensive to manually evaluate a large number of pages.
TrustRank method calls for selecting a small set of seed pages to be evaluated by an expert. Once the reputable seed pages are manually identified, a crawl extending outward from the seed set seeks out similarly reliable and trustworthy pages. TrustRank's reliability diminishes as documents become further removed from the seed set.
The researchers who proposed the TrustRank methodology have continued to refine their work by evaluating related topics, such as measuring spam mass."
Now, we can create the Authority part of the website with link building the TrustRank part becomes the challenge and we'll explore this in a future post.