SEO – Link Value & Trust Rank
search engine optimization
One of the questions that is most asked of those who do SEO for a living is how to determine the true value of a link.
For example, if you find a page that has a PR of 2, but the Page Rank of that sites home page is, let’s say 7, how much value does that link on a Page Rank 2 page actually pass on.
I firmly believe that authority rank and Page Rank are 2 very different things.
A single page has Page rank, a site has authority. The page that has the Page Rank of 2, is by itself not going to boost your sites Page Rank considerably, but if the home page of that site has a Page Rank of 7, I believe that considerable authority rank is passed on to your site.
I believe that authority rank carries far more weight overall than does page rank when it comes to determining where your site ranks.
Page Rank can certainly give you a really good idea of a sites authority status, but Google provides no tool such
as the toolbar for measuring authority status. So there is a bit of guesswork involved.
Likewise, if the page in question had a Page Rank of 0, while that page itself may not pass on much Page Rank to your site, the site itself may still pass on considerable authority rank to your site.
So it often is wise to look at the Page Rank of a sites home page to get a general idea of the authority status of that site. The Page Rank, while not indicative of authority status, is a tool that will at least give us some idea of how Google perceives a sites overall authority.
Authority status builds trust with a search engine. This trust is often referred to in SEO circles as Trust Rank.