OK, this is a immersive concept and I need to emphasise it’s not an exact science. But here is what I have learned in my research at the Backlinks clinic:
Authority – basics
The more authority your site has the higher you will rank on Google. Authority means that people trust you and your information. The great news is that authorities trusted by people are also trusted by Google. A great example is the .edu and .gov domain extensions. These domains imply they are authoratitive sources of information and it’s a proven fact that in the eyes of Google backlinks from these domains to your web pages will send authority to your web pages. Another shining example is Wikipedia as the web pages here are mostly authored by by tribes of people as opposed to a single source.
So it follows that authority is very heavily influenced by the source of your backlinks and if authoritative content link to your site then you inherit their authority and as far as Google is concerned you become more authoritative and so the trust in your content by Google goes up.
How Google pronounces what is and isn’t authoritative is kept secret for good reason and falls in line with Google’s philosophy of “Do no evil”. The last thing the web needs is an individual or a group exploiting the mechanisms that Google employs in its efforts to try and regulate probably the most significant technological development of this period in history.
How not to get Backlinks
And on this thought it’s worth my while stating some underhand sources and practices of building backlinks that Google not only dislikes but appears to be acting to ‘’categorize as illegitimate authorities. In no particular order of severity, the prime offenders are:
- Paid backlinks – web sites where people buy and sell backlinks
- Comment spam – entries that contain links on web pages that are just not related to the main theme.
- Low quality and *duplicate content – ‘scraped’ or copied
- Rapid backlink growth – there are a large selection of ways that this is achievable, Google isn’t dumb. Any sudden rise in the amount of backlinks is going to register on Google’s radar, specifically if it’s a recently registered domain.
- Backlinks from bad reputation web pages – these are particularly nasty as you are guilty by association – need I say more.
*There is another factor where I may be on dodgy ground, but key media properties appear to get a lot of authority and I have definitely seen significant numbers of the same article over and over again on different web sites with no penalties, I am still monitoring this, only as a portion of of the results I am seeing defy the normal behaviors I usually expect to see. More on this is in a future post….