Has MozTrust predicted fall in Google rankings???

[driansmith]

The definition of MozTrust is:
"MozTrust is SEOmoz's global link trust score. It is similar to MozRank but rather than measuring link popularity, it measures link trust. Receiving links from sources which have inherent trust, such as the homepages of major university websites or certain governmental web pages, is a strong trust endorsement."

That being the case it is quite disturbing that a number of websites have been hit very badly by the latest Google algorithm changes that did indeed have very respectable MozTrust rankings.

Can I ask whether anybody has carried out any sort of analysis of MozTrust versus negative impact in Google rankings? The prediction would of course be that websites suffering from a lower MozTrust would have been hit quite badly by these recent changes.

[Dr-Pete]

MozTrust isn't quite a measure of "trust" in the sense of link quality, per se. It was designed to mimic TrustRank, a factor we believe Google uses to supplement PageRank. What MozTrust and TrustRank (theoretically - we can't see in the black box) do is to take a set of trusted seed sites and determine how close in the link-graph any given site is to them. If your site is closely linked to sites like CNN and WhiteHouse.gov, for example (I'm honestly not sure what's in the seed set these days), you're more likely, on average, to be a trustworthy site.

Of course, as with Google, this is just one of hundreds of potential ranking factors. One measure we've found useful in some cases is the ration of MozTrust to MozRank. If you have ton of raw link-juice (MR) but your trust level is very low (MR), then it's often a poor quality sign.

We tend to use DA/PA more than MozRank these days, as they're based on a more complex model. Still, none of these factors look at the actual quality of the linking site or the "spamminess", per se. MR/DA/PA are primarily measures of the strength of your link profile, and MT is just one measure of potential quality.

It appears that Penguin tweaked multiple factors in the Google algorithm and may even be use them in conjunction, so even if we saw Google's own data, we probably couldn't pin it to just one thing.

[driansmith]

I understand the point you are making, but the argument is that all those websites that had substantial links from 'spammy sites' have been heavily impacted by the algorithm. Those spammy sites were very often visibly poor - we could identify many of them just by casting an eye over them.

My question remains then, surely MozTrust should have picked up these metrics and downgraded the MozTrust values for those websites linking from such obvious spammy sites? Otherwise, what is the point of MozTrust?

[driansmith]

I can see in Webmaster Tools that one of my clients have a 100 or more dead links from spammy sites that are targeted at pages that never existed.God only knows where they came from.

So, the principal would seem to be - target spam sites at a competitor and hit his rankings.

Also, if someone were 'warned' with the abnormal-link-message from Google then one would expect a problem was looming. If no communication was received then one could assume 'no problem'?

Surely, the algorithm has fused in a few of it's recesses and we just need to wait for the circuits to be rewired by the Google engineers.

[CarlosFernandes]

Great question.

My feeling is that the tools and indicators were based on the playing field pre-Penguin  and pre the ground opening up and swallowing a ton of websites (ie all the 1 million plus warnings that were sent out for unnatural links).

They lag - again in my opinion.  A dog chasing its tail.

Google has changed the game for many and what was once was not penalized is now being penalized.

No matter how anyone sugar coats it and talks about always focusing on content (all good stuff mind) - this was a significant change to the algo in the area that computes link value and relationships.

My feeling is that noone (in terms of the engineers of these tools) saw it coming and now the calculations that may go into these parameters may need to be also tweaked.

I can name many websites that had good MozRank that have been axed fromt he SERPs.

That's not criticism of SEOMoz. These websites also had good PageRank

To answer your question though - from the analysis that I have been carrying out there is NO CORRELATION between MozTrust and the websites that suffered. again - I have seen websites that have had high MozTrust go just as low ones have.

I must also note though - that these seems to be NOT domain related - but more page related.

ie   most of the websites I have looked at - seem as if they are doing poorly all around - but it seems to be that the domain itself has not been effected - but more the page  (unless Google has penalized the home page).

We have a client (an Author) who was ranking #1 on Google for one of her books.  All natural links from people linking to her book.  That page was up in the rankings for 4 years. Now it is not in the SERPs at all.  Her other pages are fine and her domain name is fine - but Google seems to think the links to that book page where she sells the book were unnatural.  So, in some rare cases it may be the entire domain - but in most cases it seems to me that it just appears that way - since webmasters affected were over optimizing or doing bad SEO  - and now all the pages that used to rank for the keywords they went after so aggressively now don't rank.

This doesn't mean their domain is toast though - unless they did this to their main home page on the domain.

I'll stop rambling now

Carlos

[brandonjschwartz]

MozTrust is something SEOmoz calculates and, while it's based on what could be expected to help you rank, it doesn't always correlate with what Google does. A website could have a high MozTrust rank but could be penalized for other issues.

Danny Dover actually suggests that you use metrics like MozTrust and Page Authority and compare them to Google metrics like SERP positioning and PageRank to discover if you're being penalized. A page that SEOmoz categorizes as having a high Page Authority but that has zero PageRank can sometimes be an indication that Google is penalizing the page or website.