OK, this is a big subject and I want to emphasise it’s not an exact science. But here is what I know in my analysis at the Backlinks clinic:
Authority – basics
The more authority your site has the better you will rank on Google. Authority means that searchers trust you and your content. The great news is that authorities trusted by humans are also recognised as trustworthy by Google. A great example is the .edu and .gov suffixes. These suffixes imply they are authoratitive sources of content and it’s an established fact that as far as Google is concerned backlinks from these web addresses to your site will contribute authority to your web pages. Another good example is Wikipedia as the entries here are mostly authored by by group of humans as opposed to a single person.
So it follows that authority is significantly influenced by the source of your backlinks and if authoritative web pages link to your web pages then you inherit their authority and in the eyes of Google you become more authoritative and hence the trust in your web pages by Google goes up.
How Google pronounces what is and isn’t authoritative is a guarded secret for good reason and aligns with Google’s philosophy of “Do no evil”. The last thing the Internet needs is an individual or a group manipulating the formulae that Google uses in its efforts to try and regulate probably the most important technological development of our times.
How not to get Authority and Backlinks
In the same vein it’s worth my while stating some ‘black hat sources and methods of building backlinks that Google not only disapproves of but appears to be acting to ‘classify’ as negative authorities. In no particular order of merit, the common offenders are:
- Paid backlinks – web pages where people buy 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 otherwise
- Unnatural 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 show up on Google’s monitoring systems, specifically if it’s a brand new 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 shakey ground, but large media portals seem to get a lot of authority and I have definitely found significant quantities of the same article over and over again on different portals with no penalties, I am still looking at this, only as some of the results I am seeing go against the consistent behaviors I usually expect to see. More on this is in a future post….