If authority sites link to one page does my whole site benefit?

[internetheaven]

Several authority sites linked to an article on one of my sites some time ago. Due to a URL change we have had to 301 the old article page to it's new location on the new site. I have 2 questions:

1. Will that page still get as much "link love" (who started that phrase? I think it's great!) as before with the 301 to the new URL?

2. Theory goes that Google will see that page as an authority now and trust-rank should shoot up. But will the whole site benefit from that trust-rank or just the one page?

Thanks
Mike

[ecmedia]

1. Probably yes but not as much.
2. Yes, one link is all you need though multiple links help even more.

[internetheaven]

1. Probably yes but not as much.

Am I to assume that the "probably" in that statement means that is more of a guess rather than the result of anything in particular you have read or heard been said?

2. Yes, one link is all you need though multiple links help even more.

Do you mean just generally multiple links into the site as a whole or that the more pages that have their own authority links then that is better for the site?

[tedster]

Here's my thoughts:

1. Experiences differ. It seems to depend on how Google evaluates many factors in the overall situation. Transfer could be full link love, partial, or none.

2. Be careful when using or reading the words "trust" and "authority". For some reason, the last few weeks have seen a particular increase in the use of the word "authority". I guess someone wrote a blog post or newsletter and the webmaster community is now buzzing. I'll get back to this question towards the end of my post.

Now some important comments that I've been holding back for a while. The words "authority" and "trust" can be helpful shorthand in discussions, but that doesn't mean anyone understands exactly how Google scores in these areas, or that everyone in the discussion is using those words to mean the same precise thing. If you go looking for those terms, you find members of discussion groups using them, you find SEO blogs using them, you find interviewers using them - but rarely Googlers themselves.

TRUST
Here's one article from Matt Cutts where he uses the word "trust", but as an aside. Also note that Google's headline for the page puts the word "Trusted" in quotes:

How Does Google Determine Which Web Sites Are the Most "Trusted?"

...Or to put it another way, if more people trust your site, your trust is more valuable.

[google.com...]

That page has several good links to papers written by people at Google on search and information retrieval. If you really want to understand these issues well, that's where I'd study.

AUTHORITY
In the strictest "Authority and Hub" meaning from Jon Kleinberg of Cornell [cs.brown.edu], it takes many strong backlinks from others in the same field to indicate an authority site. And "Hub" means a site that holds many outbound links to other good references.

Here again is a comment from Matt Cutts where he echos this Kleinberg sense of the word "authority":

...lots of pages (and important pages) link to Stanford, so it’s fair to consider them an authority.

[mattcutts.com...]

Google search engineers like Matt, Udi Manber and others have been quite picky about using both these terms, which can cause much confusion and a re not all that precise in the public mind. Such Googlers often preference their remarks by talking about "PageRank and over 100 other factors."

To address internetheaven's second question a bit more, certainly PageRank can and usually does circulate beyond the actual page being linked to. Other factors that Google uses are not as contagious.

For a mind-boggling list of what some of those 100 plus factors might be, check out Google's Historical and Age Data [appft1.uspto.gov] patent, plus the original WebmasterWorld thread [webmasterworld.com] that discusses it.