Google Pagerank Vs Google Trustrank

Google owns a big share of the market on the Internet. If you get your site ranked in Google, you will receive massive traffic. In fact, for many webmasters, the majority of the traffic comes from Google. Google provides such high quality traffic that if you run an online business, you can't afford to ignore this giant search engine. That is why more and more marketers are learning how to perform SEO for your websites.

What is SEO?

SEO stands for search engine optimization. It is a process that requires you to optimize both on-site and off-site factors to achieve better rankings in Google. When done right, it can be highly rewarding. It is beyond the scope of this article to go into SEO, as there are many factors involved. But one of the most important factors is Google PageRank.

We see Google PageRank being discussed a lot in webmaster and SEO forums. The question is, is PageRank relevant to SEO?

PageRank is Google's way of indicating whether the site is an authority site or not. It has a ranking of 0 to 10. The majority of the sites will rank between 2 and 5. A handful will rank between 6 and 8. Only top sites like Google or Microsoft get a rank of 9 or 10.

A high PageRank, however, doesn't guarantee higher rankings in the search results. Keyword relevance has got nothing to do with PageRank. If you have a web page with highly relevant content, you can still rank for certain keywords even if your PageRank is 0. So don't get carried away with PageRank. Relevant content with tons of relevant back links will be more beneficial to your site.

In fact, Google is starting to downplay the importance of PageRank, since many webmasters rely on this indicator to buy and sell links. This is a manipulative technique that may skew the search results, and Google is not too happy about it. They even removed PageRank from their Webmaster Central.

The birth of TrustRank.

More and more webmasters are starting to look at TrustRank instead of PageRank. A high PageRank doesn't guarantee high rankings, but a high TrustRank has a major impact on the rankings. If Google trust your site, and sees it as an authority site, you can rank for almost any keyword.

A slew of factors are being discussed in the SEO forums, most of which are similar to PageRank factors. For instance, back links and relevant content still matters. But TrustRanks look at a website more closely than PageRank. It will consider the loading time, whether there is regular updates, as well as the domain age.

However, till today, even though a lot of buzz has been generated about TrustRank, there is no official confirmation from Google that this rank exists.

When optimizing your site for the search engines, just be sure to observe good webmaster guidelines. For example, don't use any link cloaking or doorway pages. Post high quality content and host your site on a fast loading server. Build back links to your site gradually and your site will soon be a trusted site.