When the search engine algorithms are determining where to stick your site in the SERP rankings, one of the things that gets factored in to the decision is your linkage.  None of us knows for sure exactly how it works so there are a lot of competing opinions on how to build linkage to a site.  All of those opinions basically fall into two schools of thought:  1) Quantity and 2) Quality.

Search Engine Land has a good post looking at the latter of these two schools of thought.  As I've said before, links to your site are more valuable if they come from a trusted source.  And that's what the post at SEL deals with:  the value of trust assigned to a website.

But just like the multitude of factors that can affect your overall search ranking, so too do a number of details factor into your "trustedness" in the eyes of the search engines.  Eric Ward, who authored the Search Engine Land post, talks about a number of those details and the affects they can have on future content.

The age of a site can have an influence on your trust ranking.  As Ward points out, sites that have been around for a while and always played nice will most likely have a higher trust score than new sites or sites that have engaged in unethical practices at some time in the past.  Not only do you want your site to have a high trust rating, but you also want the sites that link to you to be trusted sources.

All of this, Ward says, explains why a new page created at a trusted site might have a higher ranking than an older page at a newer, less trustworthy site.  It's also part of the explanation for why sites with lots of incoming links still don't rank as highly as their authors think they should.  Those sites are still building trust.

So what is your trust score, you ask?  Unfortunately, it's not a concrete number that can be looked up or accessed.  There are several online tools that attempt to score or rate websites.  But they are not accessing some actual trust score that you can get from Google or Yahoo.  The trustworthiness of a website is just one part of the search engine algorithms that we never see.

Keep all this in mind when you're trying to build link popularity for your site.  It's not always about quantity.  Quality plays just as much, if not more, of a role in the impact linkage will have your site rankings.