OK, this is a immersive concept and I want to emphasise it’s not clear cut. But here is what I know in my research at the Backlinks clinic:
Authority – explained
The more authority your web pages have the better 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 domain extensions. These domains imply they are trustworthy sources of information 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 great example is Wikipedia as the entries here are mostly 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 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 decides what is and isn’t authoritative is a guarded secret for good reason and falls in line with Google’s thinking of “Do no evil”. The last thing the net needs is someone manipulating the formulae that Google uses in its efforts to try and bring some order to probably the most important technological development of our times.
How not to get Backlinks
In the same vein it’s worth my while stating some obvious sources and practices of building backlinks that Google not only dislikes but appears to be moving aggressively to ‘classify’ as negative authorities. In no particular order of merit, the common examples are:
- Paid backlinks – places where people buy and sell backlinks
- Comment spam – entries that contain links on web sites 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 rise in the number of backlinks is going to show up on Google’s radar, specifically if it’s a brand new domain.
- Backlinks from bad reputation 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 portals appear to get a lot of authority and I have definitely discovered significant quantities of the same article over and over again on different web sites with no penalties, I am still looking at this, only as some of the results I am seeing defy the consistent behaviors I normally expect to see. More on this is in a future article….
