OK, this is a big subject and I want to emphasise it’s not clear cut. But here is what I have learned in my work at the Backlinks clinic:
Authority – explained
The more authority your web pages have the higher you will rank on Google. Authority means that searchers trust you and your content. The good 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 information 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 site. Another great example is Wikipedia as the web pages here are almost always authored by by tribes of people as opposed to a single person.
So it follows that authority is largely influenced by the source of your backlinks and if authoritative web pages link to your web pages then you receive their apparent trust and in the eyes of Google you become more authoritative and hence the trust in your content by Google increases.
How Google decides what is and isn’t authoritative is confidential for solid reasons and aligns with Google’s philosophy of “Do no evil”. The last thing the net needs is someone exploiting the methods that Google untilzes in its efforts to try and regulate probably the most significant technological development of our times.
Backlinking methods you should avoid
In the same vein it’s valuable to state some common sources and practices of creating backlinks that Google not only dislikes but appears to be acting to ‘’categorize as illegitimate authorities. In no particular order of merit, the prime examples are:
- Paid backlinks – hubs where people buy and sell backlinks
- Comment spam – entries that contain links on web sites that are just not associated to the main theme.
- Low quality and *duplicate content – ‘scraped’ or copied
- Fast growth – there are a myriad of ways that this is achievable, Google isn’t stupid. Any sudden rise in the amount of backlinks is going to show up on Google’s radar, specifically if it’s a recently registered domain.
- Backlinks from ill reputed web pages – these are particularly destructive as you are guilty by association – need I say more.
*There is another factor where I may be on shakey ground, but major media properties seem to get a lot of authority and I have definitely discovered significant quantities of the same content over and over again on different portals with no penalties, I am still monitoring this, only as a portion of of the results I am seeing defy the normal behaviors I normally expect to see. More on this is in a future article….