Hmmmm, 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 analysis at the Backlinks clinic:
Authority – explained
The more authority your site has the better you will rank on Google. Authority means that people trust you and your information. The good news is that authorities trusted by humans are also trusted by Google. A great example is the .edu and .gov domain extensions. 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 site will contribute authority to your web pages. Another perfect example is Wikipedia as the contents here are largely authored by by group of humans as opposed to a single marketer.
So it follows that authority is significantly influenced by the source of your backlinks and if authoritative content link to your site then you receive their apparent trust and as far as Google is concerned you become more authoritative and hence the trust in your content by Google increases.
How Google determines what is and isn’t authoritative is undisclosed for solid reasons and falls in line with Google’s thinking of “Do no evil”. The last thing the web needs is someone exploiting the mechanisms that Google employs in its efforts to try and regulate probably the most significant technological resource of this period in history.
How not to get Authority and Backlinks
And on this thought it’s valuable to state some distasteful sources and methods of acquiring backlinks that Google not only disapproves of but appears to be acting to ‘’categorize as illegitimate authorities. In no particular order of merit, the common offenders are:
- Paid backlinks – web sites where people buy and sell backlinks
- Comment spam – entries that contain links on web sites that are just not related to the main theme.
- Low quality and *duplicate content – ‘scraped’ or copied
- Fast growth – there are a large selection of ways that this is achievable, Google isn’t dumb. Any sudden increase in the amount of backlinks is going to show up on Google’s monitoring systems, specifically if it’s a recently registered domain.
- Backlinks from villainous 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 appear to get a lot of authority and I have definitely found significant quantities of the same content over and over again on different portals with no penalties, I am still monitoring this, only as some of the results I am seeing defy the normal behaviors I normally expect to see. More on this is in a future article….
