At pubcon 2007 Suresh Babu interviewed Matt Cutts and asked him specifically to define TrustRank. Below is the video of that interview.

For those of you not able to watch the video, here’s a transcript where Matt Cutts talks about its origins and confusion between a Yahoo intern’s project and an antiphishing filter Google was developing.

What is trustrank? everybody’s curious about that. It’s kinda nice you asked because it’s good to have a chance to debunk this a little bit. So it turns out there was a summer intern who was at Yahoo and Jan Pedersen and some other people at Yahoo, and they wrote a paper about something called TrustRank; and what it does is it tries to treat reputation like it’s physical mass and see how it flows around on the web and what physical properties does trust have; and it’s really interesting stuff. But it’s completely separate from Google. So a couple of years ago at like the exact same time, Google was working on an antiphishing filter, and as part of that we needed to come up with a name for it and so they filed for a trademark, and I think they used the name TrustRank, so it was a really weird coincidence. Yahoo had a TrustRank project and we had this TrustRank trademark, and so everybody talks about TrustRank, TrustRank, TrustRank and yet if you go and ask five different SEOs you’ll have five different opinions and definitions about exactly what TrustRank is.

If you go to the US Patent and Trademark website and do a trademark search you’ll find this result:

If you go to the advanced published applications search page on US Patent and Trademark website and search for Trustrank you will find these results. Notice that none of them are filed by or Assigned to Google, although there are references to Yahoo’s link-based spam detection patent application.

IDENTIFYING SOURCES OF MEDIA CONTENT HAVING A HIGH LIKELIHOOD OF PRODUCING ON-TOPIC CONTENT
Inventors: Wolters; Timothy J.; (Superior, CO) ; Setayesh; Mehrshad; (Lafayette, CO)
Assignee Name and Adress: COLLECTIVE INTELLECT, INC. Boulder CO
Serial No.: 938691
Series Code: 11
Filed: November 12, 2007

SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR SECURE, ANONYMOUS, AND PERTINENT REPOSTING OF PRIVATE BLOG POSTING, ETC.
Inventors: Drayer; Jay A.; (Houston, TX) ; Howe; Grant M.; (Cypress, TX)
Serial No.: 923366
Series Code: 11
Filed: October 24, 2007

Enhanced Detection of Search Engine Spam
Inventors: Caldwell; Larry Thomas; (Annandale, VA)
Assignee Name and Adress: Idalis Software, Inc. Annandale VA
Serial No.: 871539
Series Code: 11
Filed: October 12, 2007

System and method for characterizing a web page using multiple anchor sets of web pages
Inventors: Joshi; Amruta Sadanand; (Palo Alto, CA) ; Ravikumar; Shanmugasundaram; (Cupertino, CA) ; Reed; Benjamin Clay; (Morgan Hill, CA) ; Tomkins; Andrew; (San Jose, CA)
Assignee Name and Adress: Yahoo! Inc. Sunnyvale CA
Serial No.: 542079
Series Code: 11
Filed: October 3, 2006

Dynamic updating of display and ranking for search results

Inventors: Ferrenq; Isabelle; (Saint Lattier, FR) ; Chevalier; Pierre-Yves; (Biviers, FR)
Assignee Name and Adress: EMC Corporation
Serial No.: 522498
Series Code: 11
Filed: September 15, 2006

User-sensitive pagerank
Inventors: Berkhin; Pavel; (Sunnyvale, CA) ; Fayyad; Usama M.; (Sunnyvale, CA) ; Raghavan; Prabhakar; (Saratoga, CA) ; Tomkins; Andrew; (San Jose, CA)
Assignee Name and Adress: YAHOO! INC.
Serial No.: 474195
Series Code: 11
Filed: June 22, 2006

Providing a rating for a web site based on weighted user feedback

Inventors: Repasi; Rolf; (Sunrise Beach, AU) ; Clausen; Simon; (New South Wales, AU)
Serial No.: 803922
Series Code: 11
Filed: May 16, 2007

Search engine with augmented relevance ranking by community participation
Inventors: Xu; Zhichen; (San Jose, CA) ; Berkhin; Pavel; (Sunnyvale, CA) ; Rose; Daniel E.; (Cupertino, CA) ; Mao; Jianchang; (San Jose, CA) ; Ku; David; (Palo Alto, CA) ; Lu; Qi; (Saratoga, CA) ; Walther; Eckart; (Palo Alto, CA) ; Tam; Chung-Man; (San Francisco, CA)
Serial No.: 478291
Series Code: 11
Filed: June 28, 2006

Trust propagation through both explicit and implicit social networks
Inventors: Berkhim; Pavel; (Sunnyvale, CA) ; Xu; Zhichen; (San Jose, CA) ; Mao; Jianchang; (San Jose, CA) ; Rose; Daniel E.; (Cupertino, CA) ; Taha; Abe; (Sunnyvale, CA) ; Maghoul; Farzin; (Hayward, CA)
Assignee Name and Adress: Yahoo! Inc. Sunnyvale CA
Serial No.: 498637
Series Code: 11
Filed: August 2, 2006

Realtime indexing and search in large, rapidly changing document collections
Inventors: Rose; Daniel E.; (Cupertino, CA) ; Mao; Jianchang; (San Jose, CA) ; Walters; Chad; (San Francisco, CA)
Assignee Name and Adress: Yahoo! Inc. Sunnyvale CA
Serial No.: 498706
Series Code: 11
Filed: August 2, 2006

Using community annotations as anchortext
Inventors: Rose; Daniel E.; (Cupertino, CA) ; Mao; Jianchang; (San Jose, CA) ; Xu; Zhichen; (San Jose, CA) ; Ku; David; (Palo Alto, CA) ; Lu; Qi; (Saratoga, CA) ; Walther; Eckart; (Palo Alto, CA) ; Tam; Chung-Man; (San Francisco, CA)
Serial No.: 498682
Series Code: 11
Filed: August 2, 2006

Link-based spam detection
Inventors: Barkhin; Pavel; (Sunnyvale, CA) ; Gyongyi; Zoltan Istvan; (Stanford, CA) ; Pedersen; Jan; (Los Altos Hills, CA)
Assignee Name and Adress: Yahoo! Inc. Sunnyvale CA
Serial No.: 198471
Series Code: 11
Filed: August 4, 2005

So since Google has dropped the trademark, does not have any patent applications for it and Matt Cutts explained the confusion, I think I’d call this myth busted!

Update (7/12/2008):
The NPGA has taken down this page from their site, so here’s an archived copy of that page:

http://web.archive.org/web/20070804042015/http://www.npga.org/i4a/pages/index.cfm?pageid=529

Here’s a couple of screenshots of the top referring phrases. You can clearly see the differences.

Old:

New:

So as you can see, there’s quite a discrepancy, even for my site which doesn’t get a lot of traffic at all. I think I’m going to have to dig into this further and compare these stats with log files to see which is more accurate. I also want to make sure that the tracking codes really do appear on every page, to make sure that isn’t skewing the stats somewhat.

I’ll post back again when I find more info. If anyone else is doing a similar test, what are you finding?

We were up against some tough competition from some local companies with very cool products, so it’s very exciting that ECNext was chosen.

In Jan 2007 ECNext also won the category for Outstanding Technology Team Under 50 People (press release).

TopCAT Awards have been run by TechColumbus for the past 10 years and is recognized as a premier event for technology companies in Central Ohio. The ceremony was held last night and drew over one thousand attendees compared to one hundred at its launch in 1997.

ECNext runs the fastest growing business information research website (manta.com), providing over 45 million worldwide company profiles and enables researchers to purchase online and download detailed market research, industry analysis reports and company news.

Google starts releasing additional services to diversify their revenue streams, like the Google search appliance, site targeting, radio and print ads.

At some point here, they suddenly realized that they have this great money making scheme called Google Adsense, but they only ever take a cut out of each ad because as a search engine, they’re designed to send traffic away. The next logical step here, from a money making point of view, is to take a larger percentage, or take the entire ad revenue. They can only do that if they become a content publisher. At that point there’s a huge conflict of interest in serving relevant, unbiased results and a serving up your own site, which makes money.

In Oct 2006 Google bought Youtube , then in May 2007 they launch Universal search to provide Youtube with more exposure in the search results.

Now with Google knol they want to extend publishing to textual content and run adsense. To ensure quality content and to keep the spammers at bay they will probably not offer a rev share either.

Since wikipedia has such a strong organic presence, that leaves 9 spots on page 1 for other reference material type sites. Enter Google knol and that reduces it to 8. Throw in Google’s diversification of search results and now for ecommerce queries, you may find that there’s only 1 spot left on page 1 for an informational article about a product.

So once knol builds critical mass, what could happen? Well obviously sites like about.com will loose rankings to knol. answers.com who already took a 28% traffic hit this year could face a double whammy by loosing rankings and having their keywords links in the results are replaced with knols.

What do you think might happen? Would you want to contribute an authoritative article to knol?

No Google Traffic
After taking on this client I gained access to their webtrends reports and it showed an astounding lack of Google organic traffic. I looked over the meta tags and page content and all seemed to be targeting the right set of keywords to some degree, although onpage could still use some improvement.

I knew they weren’t doing anything advanced like IP delivery so I used Firefox with the useragent switcher extension and confirmed that with my useragent set to googlebot, slurp or msnbot I could browse the site without any problems. After checking the robots.txt I found that googlebot had been disallowed! After asking the client’s developer why they decided to ban googlebot their response was: It was crawling the site too often and there were errors on some of the pages that were leading to open database connections and locking up the server.

Needless to say the developers got a quick lesson in why banning googlebot to mask their programming errors is not good business practice.

Want to hear more stories? Do you have any of your own you’d like to share?

Optimizing PDFs for Search Engines (1.8MB PDF file)

For those I didn’t get to meet, feel free to leave a comment, or you can catch up with me (my username is Pittbug) on the SEO refugee forums.

Thanks to Brett Tabke for the free beers, I shall return again next year.