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 research at the Backlinks clinic:
Authority – explained
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 trusted 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 in the eyes of Google backlinks from these domains to your site will send authority to your web pages. Another perfect example is Wikipedia as the entries here are largely contributed to by group of humans 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 you then you inherit their authority and as far as Google is concerned you become more authoritative and so the trust in your web pages by Google goes up.
How Google decides 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 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 Authority and Backlinks
In the same vein it’s valuable to state some common sources and practices of creating backlinks that Google not only disapproves of but appears to be acting to ‘’categorize as illegitimate authorities. In no particular order of merit, the prime offenders are:
- Paid backlinks – web pages where individuals 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 copied
- Unnatural 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 monitoring systems, specifically if it’s a brand new domain.
- Backlinks from bad reputation 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 news properties seem to get a lot of authority and I have definitely observed significant quantities of the same content over and over again on different web sites 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….