That's very interesting, thanks for sharing that Tom.
There's TrustRank and then there's Topical TrustRank. Turns out that TrustRank (TR) is unreliable because ultimately it's about quantity (plus a built in bias, etc.). What makes Topical TrustRank (TTR) so useful is it's about Quality of relevance. Playing around with Majestic's Topical TrustRank I realized they went very far in nailing down relevance. With TTR you can instantly understand the relevance factor of the inlinks. We know there is no factor called Trust, although confusingly to some there are Trust Factors. TTR nails down the relevance of inlinks. Relevance is, in my opinion, one of the most important factors for ranking. There are other factors for determining your "trustworthiness" which is another way of saying whether you are spam or not spam. But I think that after you get past that door then you're subject to whether you're relevant for a query or not.
The trustworthy part, I don't believe TrustRank scores can measure that because those are largely Quantity metrics that are relative (subjective) and can be gamed. But the relevance part is a little harder to game. Nevertheless, I quite find it useful to at least have the Relevance piece of the puzzle and Majestic's TTR is quite remarkable and useful in that respect. I'm not sure it's well recognized how useful that bit of information is.
