One of the hardest things to deal with in the search marketing industry is the wide variety of opinions and “fact” circulating which are either contradictory or just plain wrong. The truth is very hard to filter out sometimes. Often, even the best of us cling to a piece of information that in the long run turns out to be inaccurate.

I am going to have to change my tune on a piece of information I have held as truth for quite some time now. My good friend Marjory pointed me to a video the other day (via a shared del.icio.us bookmark) which is counter to what I been teaching for a while now. Matt Cutts of Google in a short interview at PubCon this year give us the real history behind Google’s trademark of the term “Trust Rank”.

The Theory is Still Correct

Now for some time now I have been teaching that “Trust Rank” is an evolved form of “PageRank”. The early versions of PageRank focused on the quantity of inbound links to a site as its primary influencing factor. As it evolved the focus shifted from quantity to quality. The relevancy and trust of the linking site became much more of a factor and this evolved form of PageRank was now termed Trust Rank.

Well, the theory is still sound and the changes did take place, the only difference now is that it is not called Trust Rank … it’s just Evolved PageRank.

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