Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Today's question comes from Canada.
And the question is from JZ Becker, who wants to know, can
you talk a bit about ranking signals like trust?
We hear these mentioned from time to time by Googlers, but
there's no official documentation available from
Google on the topic.
Great question.
Trust is sort of a catch-all term that we use.
So PageRank is the most well known type of trust. It's
looking at links and how important those links are.
So if you have a lot of very high quality links, then you
tend to earn a lot of trust with Google.
There's other signals.
There's over 200 different signals that
we use in our ranking.
But you can kind of break them down into this notion of sort
of trust and how well you match a particular query.
So how topical you are.
What's your information retrieval score?
Just on the merits of what the user typed in.
PageRank is one of these trust-type algorithms that's
trying to figure out--
we use several words--
reputation, trust, authority.
And it's not that we have something specifically called
trust rank, or we have something specifically called
authority rank, or something like that.
We're basically just trying to say, in the general scheme of
things, how much reputation, or how much are we willing to
believe that this is a high quality page, or a high
quality site?
Those sorts of things.
So in general, what you want to have is a
very reputable site.
But you also want to have a site that's about, or a page
that's about, the topic that the user typed in.
So in an ideal world, you've got both.
It's very high on the reputation scale, but it's
also exactly what the user was looking for in terms of typing
in and finding a match for what they were typing.
So we use a lot of different words like
trust, reputation, authority.
And PageRank is a specific example of
those sorts of things.
But we mean it in a more general sense.
It's not, typically, a specific algorithm.
It's just trying to figure out how much-- if a regular user
saw this, maybe without even seeing a query at all--
how much would they consider it a high quality page?
How much would they consider it really useful, as far as
being able to answer whatever questions that
particular site was about?
Hope that helps.