OK, this is a big subject and I want to emphasise it’s not an exact science. But here is what I have learned in my research at the Backlinks clinic:
Authority – simplified
The more authority your site has the better you will rank on Google. Authority means that people trust you and your information. The great news is that authorities trusted by humans are also trusted by Google. A great example is the .edu and .gov suffixes. These suffixes imply they are trustworthy sources of content and it’s a proven fact that in the eyes of Google backlinks from these web addresses to your web pages will contribute authority to your web pages. Another good example is Wikipedia as the contents here are almost always authored by by tribes of people as opposed to a single person.
So it follows that authority is significantly influenced by the source of your backlinks and if authoritative sites link to your web pages then you inherit their apparent trust and in the eyes of Google you become more authoritative and so the trust in your site by Google increases.
How Google declares what is and isn’t authoritative is kept secret for good reason and aligns 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 bring some order to probably the most significant technological resource of our times.
How not to get Authority and Backlinks
In the same vein it’s worth my while stating some underhand sources and practices of creating backlinks that Google not only disapproves of but appears to be moving aggressively to ‘’categorize as negative authorities. In no particular order of merit, the common offenders are:
- Paid backlinks – places where individuals purchase and sell backlinks
- Comment spam – entries that have links on web pages that are just not associated to the main content.
- 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 stupid. Any sudden increase in the amount of backlinks is going to register on Google’s monitoring systems, specifically if it’s a brand new domain.
- Backlinks from villainous web pages – these are particularly henous as you are guilty by association – need I say more.
*There is another factor where I may be on dodgy ground, but reputable news portals seem to get a lot of authority and I have definitely found significant quantities of the same content 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 go against the consistent behaviors I normally expect to see. More on this is in a future post….