Matt Cutts explains “Trust”, “Reputation” and “Authority”…or not.

Google has released another of Matt Cutts’ videos, this time regarding “Trust”.

Trust is a concept that comes up quite often and it generally is one that divides opinions, and makes many SEOs start shouting about unfair tactics, and grandfather rights, while others (usually the people working for clients like Sky News) are all in favour of Google’s apparent tactics on the matter (right up until it becomes more profitable for Sky news to jump on the “Down with Google!” Bandwagon).

Matt’s video did a good job of explaining where the trust comes into it and what kinds of factors drive it, and at the same time he has successfully let the waters of understanding cloud over in a whirl of muddy logic.

Clarifying Google’s Trust Calculation

To paraphrase the video, Matt is very clear that there is no single algorithm or calculation dealing with Trust. Trust fits in with a bunch of phrases, a group that includes Reputation and Authority, that describe how Google tries to establish the quality of a page, and how much Google believes that the page does come from a source that it would be happy to send users to. So there is no definitive score of Trust for your website and also no metric that you can look at to discover the level of “Trust” Google has in your site, nor the actual “Reputation” you have.

Trust Issues: how this doesn’t help us with SEO

The only concrete thing that Matt says in his video is that Pagerank is one specific factor that does contribute to the nebulous cloud of signals that Google uses to determine the value given the equally fuzzy descriptions of trust, reputation or authority.

In many ways, this information is downright unhelpful and logically a little bit misleading.

The unhelpful factor comes in that the only metric touted that we can use to figure out if we have a higher value of trust than our competition is Pagerank, a metric that now rarely determines the position of our websites in search and one that Google has spent considerable effort in trying to draw attention away from, to prevent people wasting time on the pagerank sculpting tactics of old. So we still don’t know for sure, how to go about gaining trust.

The Logically misleading information is a little less clear (sorry!): The descriptions used to ‘reveal’ the trust factor are very fuzzy, Matt talks about, “In the General Scheme of Things”, and that’s great, if we were dealing with a human being. Computers don’t do “In the General Scheme of Things” and Google is a computer based system, that must work to specific rules and even in a complex cloud of signals then there will be groupings and results that give a better “Trust” figure for one website than it does for others. So even if they don’t generate a specific figure, one does exist and we are still no closer than our own experience to knowing what changes will have a positive effect.

Which for all SEOs out there who, by definition, have their own theories on how to impress Google and get their clients’ sites page 1 position 1 results, is probably a good thing!