Individuals and businesses have always been in search of the holy grail of SEO ranking, looking for that SEO metric that would give the highest boost to their search engine ranking.

Well, I'm not going to reveal that particular metric that you may have looking for. And that's because Google hasn't revealed that to me or to anyone for that matter. That's their trade secret and I think it would stay that way for a long while.

However, there are some metrics that provide us with insights to improving our search ranking. And this tutorial covers two of the most important SEO metrics we have out there – talking about TrustRank and PageRank and what you need to know about these two.

About TrustRank

Every business transaction, whether trading, investment, or sales, is executed based on trust. As a buyer, you trust that the seller is giving you the right product or service in exchange for your money. So, trust is fundamental to every business dealing no matter the kind of business involved.

It's the same thing when it comes to the use of search engines to access information. Search engines are designed to help users source for the right information from trusted sources (websites).

It means search engines should have ways of finding out if the search results are from trusted websites.

TrustRank is a computer algorithm that was developed for finding out the trust levels of websites. It uses a number of variables (trust signals) in arriving at the trustworthiness of each website.

The algorithm uses these trust signals to separate trusted websites from those it considers spam sites. Any site that lacks the trust signals is considered a spam site and, therefore, excluded from search results.

Why would anyone decide to create spam sites in the first place?

It’s the same reason others cheat in business – in order to gain undue advantage over competitors. So you find site owners creating misleading websites, duplicating other websites’ contents, and publishing websites filled with thin contents.

The objective of TrustRank was to find out websites that indulge in this unholy practice and to label them as such. Does Google make use of TrustRank in its search ranking algorithm?

It is not clear if TrustRank is a ranking metric used by Google, but what is clear is that Google measures the trust of each website it ranks. So, it means that the search engine giant has its own way of finding out the trust level of each site.