OK, this is a multi-faceted subject and I need to emphasise it’s not an exact science. But here is what I know in my work at the Backlinks clinic:
Authority – simplified
The more authority your web pages have the better you will rank on Google. Authority means that people trust you and your information. The good news is that authorities trusted by people are also recognised as trustworthy by Google. A good illustration is the .edu and .gov suffixes. These suffixes imply they are authoratitive sources of content and it’s a proven fact that in the eyes of Google backlinks from these domains to your site will “pass on” authority to your site. Another good example is Wikipedia as the entries 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 you then you receive their influence and in the eyes of Google you become more authoritative and hence the trust in your site by Google increases.
How Google declares what is and isn’t authoritative is confidential 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 manipulating the mechanisms that Google employs in its efforts to try and bring some order to probably the most significant technological asset of this period in history.
Backlinking methods you should avoid
And on this thought it’s worth my while stating some common sources and practices of building backlinks that Google not only dislikes but appears to be acting to ‘’categorize 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 related 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 dumb. Any sudden rise in the number of backlinks is going to register on Google’s radar, specifically if it’s a recently registered domain.
- Backlinks from villainous sites – 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 large media portals appear to get a lot of authority and I have definitely discovered significant numbers of the same article over and over again on different portals with no penalties, I am still monitoring 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 article….
