In many SEO forums and blogs and as well lots of professional marketers are mentioning “authority rank” or “trust rank” as an important search algorithm factors/signals. Now, according to a new video by Google (with Matt Cutts of course), there are no such thing at all…

Matt is explaining that trust or authority are more of a “catch-all term” that Googlers are using to describe how Google is perceiving in general certain websites. He is giving as an example the Pagerank, which is one of the most famous and transparent (however, not so deciding) “trust” signals.

Matt continue and saying that there are over 200 different search rankings signals and it is possible to categorize them (separately or as a group) to sort of trust or authority factors, based on the general topic of the query and its correlation to the site or page.

At this point, Matt is stating very loud and clear that Google doesn’t has any (search rankings signal) called “trust rank” or “authority rank”, these are just general descriptions of the site’s quality and how relevant it is to the specific query.

More Transparency From Google

Until now, Google almost never discussed its search algorithm and rankings signals. This video is a continuity of better search algorithm transparency with the webmasters community by Google, after also beginning a tradition of posting monthly search updates (posted one for November and one for December).

This is a great process that will surely help us to work from home better and easier, while focusing on the essence of things. Here is the full video: