Hmmmm, this is a immersive concept and I need to emphasise it’s not an exact science. But here is what I know 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 people are also recognised as trustworthy by Google. A great example is the .edu and .gov domain extensions. These domains imply they are trustworthy 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 send authority to your site. Another great example is Wikipedia as the contents here are largely contributed to by group of humans as opposed to a single source.
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 authority and as far as Google is concerned you become more authoritative and so the trust in your content by Google goes up.
How Google determines what is and isn’t authoritative is confidential for solid reasons and aligns with Google’s thinking of “Do no evil”. The last thing the Internet needs is someone manipulating the methods that Google employs in its efforts to try and regulate probably the most significant technological resource of our times.
Backlinking methods you should avoid
In the same vein 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 negative authorities. In no particular order of merit, the prime examples are:
- Paid backlinks – hubs where people purchase and sell backlinks
- Comment spam – entries that contain 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 myriad of ways that this is achievable, Google isn’t stupid. Any sudden increase in the number of backlinks is going to show up on Google’s radar, 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 dodgy ground, but large media properties appear to get a lot of authority and I have definitely seen significant numbers of the same content over and over again on different portals with no penalties, I am still looking at this, only as a portion of of the results I am seeing go against the consistent behaviors I usually expect to see. More on this is in a future article….
