search rankings

While PageRank was a huge thing in SEO for years, it’s recently been laid to rest. This happened in March of 2016, when Google killed off its Toolbar PageRank feature. While PageRank didn’t have a huge user base before it was axed, there were a small handful of marketers and SEOs still using it, and those people will now need to find something to fill its place. The good news is that the death of PageRank is just another indicator of Google’s ongoing commitment to a “quality over quantity” model, wherein amazing content is rewarded. The other piece of great news is that the post-PageRank world is anything but a desolate wasteland. Quite the opposite, in fact! While PageRank had its devotees, most experts agree that it was an outdated and inefficient tool that wasn’t keeping up with the trajectory of online content and user experience. As such, it’s actually a good thing that it’s fallen by the wayside and made room for newer, more intuitive tools to take its place. Alexa Ranking and Topical Trust Flow are two modern quality gauges that are the perfect candidates to restore reliable trust metrics and help both marketers and consumers interact with more reliable content. We’re here today to talk about both. Ready? The Slow Death of PageRank If you’re sad to hear about PageRank heading out, you’re not the only one. Google had been slowly killing the tool for years, though. Here’s a brief history: PageRank was developed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the Founders of Google, at Stanford University in 1996. Originally, the tool was part of a larger research product relating to search and how it could be improved. At the time of its development, PageRank was revolutionary and heralded a whole new era, when web pages would be judged by the quality of their content rather than the concentration of their keywords. The service eventually launched, with Google as its only user. Over time, though, other search engines saw that PageRank was improving accuracy and authority, and they started adopting the system into their algorithms. The program was short-lived, though, and soon started to come under fire. Search Engine Roundtable reports that, in 2007, Google asked its webmasters to provide some feedback about the idea of axing PageRank. In 2009, Google stopped showing data from PageRank in its Webmaster Tools section. In 2013, Matt Cutts officially alluded to the death of PR: Credit MySiteAuditor By 2016, PageRank was on its way out, and SEOs and marketers everywhere were turning to the next reliable quality metric. Although some were sad about the end of PageRank, most people realized that, as good as PageRank had been, it had its drawbacks. Namely: quality could be faked, and even spammy web pages and websites could have PageRank if they knew how to game the system. These shortcomings set the stage perfectly for the next big thing, lurking just over the horizon. Topical Trust Flow: What You Need to Know The thing that first stepped up to take PageRank’s place is known as Topical Trust Flow, a tool created by Majestic SEO.  Essentially, Topical Trust Flow determines how trustworthy and authoritative a URL or domain is within its niche while also determining what the topic of the content is all about. It does this by determining a site’s topical relevance based on the links it enjoys with other relevant sites. Unlike PageRank, the quality metrics within Trust Flow are difficult to fake, since it’s actually the content that links to a page that determines its Topical Trust Flow. Topical Trust Flow came at just the right time: with more than fifty million content shares every day, and 58% of consumers reporting they trust editorial content, (according to Nielsen), the web was in dire need of a more reliable trust metric than PageRank. How Does Trust Flow Work? Trust Flow is one of Majestic’s most useful tools for SEO practitioners. Flow is calculated using a set of authoritative seed websites as a base. The further away your domain lies from those seed sites, the lower the Trust Flow is. The set of authority sites measured link out to other great sites, which link out to yet more sites. The whole system works like an underground root system, relying on a complex network of connections and inbound messages to determine stability and reliability.  Here’s a diagram from seoworx.net.au to demonstrate how it works: If you’re still struggling to understand Trust Flow, think of it like this: Topical Trust Flow measures the quality of inbound links based on the quality of the links pointing to the site your links come from. If every one of your inbound links come from sites that already have high Trust Flow, your domain is also going to have a high Trust Flow. This is because the sites your links come from are seen as reputable and reliable, thanks to the inbound links they’ve received. Trust Flow can be a tough metric to manipulate, making it almost impossible to fake or inflate. As such, it’s a much more reliable trust metric than PageRank, which relied on data that could easily be faked. 3 Facts to Know About Topical Trust Flow Here are three key truths about Trust Flow and how it operates in the complex online world: 1. Trust Flow Relies on Relevance A topically-matched trust flow that is high means the sites your links are coming from also have links that are topically relevant. 2. Trust Flow Rewards Trustworthy Links A high trust flow means your inbound links come from sites that have trustworthy links. 3. Trust Flow Looks for Topical Similarities A domain’s ability to rank increases when it has topically matched links that come from websites that have topically matched links, too. To help you further understand how these truths play out in the Trust Flow algorithm, here’s a diagram from Majestic SEO: How Trust Flow Supports 5 Crucial Foundations of SEO While it might be easy to write … Read more