When i first talked about how we can kiss Pagerank goodbye and welcome the new algorithm, i was quite certain something confidential is brewing underground of Google's Headquarter. While my guess might be wrong on the rumors of the new Orion search engine which could take another 18 months, it was the pagerank penalties affecting many bloggers which tinker me to suspect Trustrank is the new development which might overrun pagerank in future. Could it be the cause of all the Pagerank Tsunami wipeout?

A quick history on Google Trustrank(TR), It was published in 2004 by Zoltán Gyöngyi, Hector Garcia-Molina, Jan Pedersen. The basic idea is pretty much the same, using the linking structure to generate a measure for the quality of a page. TR can be considered as a further development of the Pagerank procedure. It seems they have taken quite a while to perfect this algorithm and testing it without any official release or statement.

The TrustRank method calls for selecting a small set of seed pages to be evaluated by an expert. Once the reputable seed pages are manually identified, a crawl extending outward from the seed set seeks out similarly reliable and trustworthy pages. TrustRank's reliability diminishes as documents become further removed from the seed set. (Source:Wikipedia)

In my own opinion, Trustrank is a system to counter those who have been using linking schemes to increase their ranking over the years. It might not be obvious, but i would not like to jump into conclusion that the penalties had to do with paid links alone, there are many other bloggers who have also suffered a great drop in ranking, so there could be many factors which could contribute to the drop of your rank.

Since Trustrank is evaluated manually by an expert, everything is pretty much confidential on how they actually assessed the situation on giving you a red card and demerit points on your site.

TrustRank Algorithm
A simple variant of the TrustRank algorithm is given by

TrustRank =  M-1 * X

The matrix M is given by

M = 1 – d T

M is actually the Matrix & X the source vector of the trust. Within the Matrix d is actually the Damping Factor and T is the Transition matrix(outgoing links). Actually the whole concept of this algorithm is the same as pagerank just an extra factor on trust. Now how can we turn this trust on us?

Fallen into the Pit of Serpents
The number of bloggers which have fallen under the Google Pagerank Penalties could well form a full soccer squad with international stars(Total of 16 Players with 5 on the reserve bench)

Adesblog (7 star to 5 star)
Seroundtable (7 star to 4 star)
John Chow (6 star to 4 star)
JohnTP ( 6 star to 4 star)
(6 star to 4 star)
Entrepreneurs-journey (6 star to 4 star)
Problogger ( 6 star to 4 star)
Quickonlinetips (6 star to 3 star)
Netbusinessblog (5 star to 3 star)
AndyBeard (5 star to 3 star)
(5 star to 3 star)
Rotorblog (5 star to 3 star)
TylerCruz (5 star to 3 star)
Carlocab ( 4 star to 3 star)
Jobmob (4 star to 2 star)
Courtney Tuttle ( 3 star to 1 star)

Daniel Scocco from dailyblogtips and Andy Beard have also compile a list of bloggers and webmaster who got washed out by the recent pagerank tsunami.

What caused the penalty still stands firmly on Selling Text link ads
Most of the bloggers affected have been selling text link ads on their blog, but there are also some who do not sell them and still got the slapped by Google. No one knows the exactly why this is happening. If you are selling links, don't get into trouble with Google's latest paid link form report system. It could well be the end of paid links using PR as an advantage to sell links on your blog.

The confusion came when Matt brought up a topic on text links and pagerank which advises us on using unique heading for ads instead of featured,sponsors,partners and if your advertisers purely is looking for click-traffic or to build a buzz on the site.

"Using rel=”nofollow” attribute. The nofollow tag allows a site to add a link that abstains from being an editorial vote. Using nofollow is a safe way to buy links, because it’s a machine-readable way to specify that a link doesn’t have to be counted as a vote by a search engine."

Increasing your Trustranking with SEO - Do it now or later
I believe right now you can assume that Search engine optimization takes time. Anywhere from 3 months to a year and there is no way around this which could change the fact, any black SEO or short term SEO should be dismissed.

1. A domain name that is registered for a long period of time could gain creditability from google, register your domain name for a minimum of 5 years to 10 years. A website that’s registered for a long time is probably going to be given priority over one that is only registered for a year.
   
   
2. Working with an SSL certificate on your site tells Google that you are a serious merchant that cares what happens to its customers and that intends to treat anyone who visits the site fairly.Also be liberal with your contact information on the site.This gives you credibility with TrustRank.
   
   Source: Christopher Angus via selfseo
   
   
3. The classic way of gaining trust is to exchange links with relevant neighbours. A quality link is worth much more than 100's of other unrelated backlinks.
   
   
4. Listen to Google and you will be on track, don't buy links from SEO providers, a good SEO provider will never advise you how to obtain a good link from the network and it should bring good and positive results on a long term basis.
   

While Trustrank is implemented on a human review basis, positive and negative trust could be automatically reviewed and overwrite the final manual evaluation. If you have suffered from the Google Pagerank Penalty, think of the ways you can do to remove the penalty that is going against you.

Searchengineland - A Workflow For Managing Google Penalties
SEOmoz - How to Handle a Google Penalty
TechCrunch - Google Declares Jihad On Blog Link Farms
Searchengineguide - Avoiding Search Engine Penalties
David Airey - How I reversed my Google ranking penalty

*I was just wondering with my fat pagerank zero, would i still get a penalty for selling link to be demoted to -2, i guess most likely i would stay as it is a fat zero until the tsunami stops hitting the major city bloggers!

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