Trust vs. Authority
We (search engine marketing people) tend to speak nearly interchangeably about Trust from Google and Authority sites, or authority links. A discussion at Webmaster World clarifies this, and it is worth addressing.
Google refers to trust and authority in their patent, and careful analysis of the wording, as summarized by Tedster, makes clear that the words are not interchangeable. This point is not too important, as you want your site to become trusted, AND an authority. And you want to obtain links from trusted sites, and authority sites. So it is pretty much splitting hairs.
But I am fairly analytical (I can hear John scoffing at the understated choice of the word ‘fairly’), so I like hair splitting. So here goes: Trust means that a site overall is trusted. This will be one of the larger sites, with very high traffic, lots of content, one of the heavy players. This is a site Google trusts as a well established legitimate, respected sites. Amazon. Government sites. Wikipedia. Plenty of reasons to trust them, very few not to trust them. In my mind, I picture doing my own research on any particular topic, what sites do I trust? Trusted sites do rank higher even when less relevant. Trusted sites pass a lot of juice, a link from a trusted site is gold.
An authority would be a page or site that is an authority on a specific topic. This site may not be trusted, but this particular page, section, or site, becomes an authority on a topic. This is gauged by incoming links on the topic; the more links a site has on that topic/keyword, the more of an authority it is on that topic. This will rank higher. This will also pass link juice if you gain a link from a page that is considered an authority. The authority of a page is topic specific, not site specific.
As I said, not too important to understand in too much detail, but the way I am using this concept is: showing clients why we will value incoming links from potentially authoritative pages, regardless of PR, as a substantial addition. Looking at a page’s PR is a shortcut but not an accurate barometer of authority. PR maybe be tied to trust in Google’s eyes, but authority is obtained much more easily on specific topics.
