Authority & Trust - Real or Imagined

[Shaddows]

Among the most misunderstood terms bandied about here are "Trust" and "Authority", often deployed in analysis without critical thinking, and apparently assumed by everyone to apply to their site.

Tedster started (and pinned) a good intro about the difference between trust and authority [webmasterworld.com], which ended up focussing on the weaker metric, Trust.

Authority was analysed thus:
"[In] Larry Page's original patent, authority in Google's terminology comes from backlinks. When lots of other websites link to your website, you become more and more of an authority."

Which is fine as far as it goes, but frankly captures neither the power nor the reality of this factor in today's algorithm.

Do we really consider Authority to be a query-dependant factor based on raw on-topic link volume (even allowing for second-generation link power)? Is Trust basically PageRankII, an evolution based on the conceptual integration of degrees of separation from hand picked positive and negative seeds?

Or put another way, what criteria would you expect a site to meet before it could claim either Trust or Authority from Google?

[tedster]

I consider trust to be a query independent factor, but authority is necessarily a query DEPENDENT factor. Stated another way, a site is an authority about something, but it simply has a level of trust.

Basic and oversimplified:
Trust = click distance from hand picked seed sites
Authority = widely linked to on certain topics

[Shaddows]

Ok, I can agree with the "Trust" issue to a point. I might even accept your basic definition as a necessary condition of "authority", but not a sufficient one.

I just do not see that "authority" is simply an on-topic link count. Or if it is, then the term is being deployed out of context, in a misleading way, repeatedly, by many members.

Let me try a different take on this.

What would you infer (assuming you believed them) from someone saying
"I have a 5 year old Authority site"

Would it simply be
"I have a five year old site with lots of relevant backlinks"

What do you* mean when they talk about an Authority site?

*By "you", I don't mean just Tedster. I'm looking to see if there is a consensus among members about what THEY mean and understand, even (in fact especially) if it isn't Google's original definintion

[Shaddows]

Let me have a stab at MY understanding of the statement "I have a 5 year old Authority site"

"I have a five year old site, tightly focussed on one subject (or closely related subjects), covering many different aspects of that subject. Other sites in my niche frequently link to me for specific material, and unrelated sites link to me as a reference for my subject. I get direct traffic (or G referal strings are my site name) as people specifically seek me out for information on my chosen subject"

Note that this does not preclude related backlinks as a measure of authority (indeed it depends on them to a great extent), its just that "authority", to me, implies something more