To deal with the growing problem of search engine manipulation, companies have been working on new techniques and methods that will help identify the offending sites. One of the most popular new methods is called Trust Rank .
Why is it needed? Unfortunately, many new web pages are actually spam pages that are used to promote a certain product or service and through trickery they receive SEO ranking that they do not deserve. This often results in poor or inaccurate web search where users are directed to sites that they were not looking for. This process also affects legitimate websites that are being deprived of the ranking they rightly deserve.
The problem is that search engines are easy to trick and spam can only be detected manually, by human experts. Of course, it is far too time-consuming and expensive for experts to check these rankings on their own. But since experts are the only people that can detect manipulation, Trust Rank tries to use them in the most effective and affordable way possible.
How does it work? Generally speaking, an expert will be assigned a group of seed pages, which he will then proceed to examine for signs of manipulation. Once he has removed all of the suspicious pages, he will send out a crawl from the reputable pages that attempts to identify similar pages.
The only problem with Trust Rank is that its effectiveness and consistency diminishes the longer the seed set is used. Therefore, experts are needed on a regular basis to create new seed sets, which will undoubtedly increase expenses for search engines.