Suresh Spoke with Matt Cutts from Google about what exactly Trust Rank is and here’s what Matt had to say.

Matt: what is trust rank? Everybody is curious about that, its kinda nice you asked because it’s a chance to debunk this a little bit…

So it turns out that there was a summer intern at yahoo, and Peterson and some other people at yahoo… and they wrote a paper on something about “Trust Rank” and what it does, is treats reputation like its physical mass and how it goes around in the web and what physical properties does trust have and its really interesting stuff.

But it’s completely separate from Google so a couple of years ago at the exact same time, Google was working on an anti-phishing filter and as part of that we had to come up with a name for it and they filed for a trade mark and I think they used “Trust Rank”…

And so it was a really weird co-incidence that Yahoo had trust rank project and we had this trust rank trade mark and so everybody goes like Trust rank, trustrank, trust Rank… and if you go ask five different SEOs they’ll have five different opinions and definitions on about what exactly trust rank is…