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 – basics
The more authority your site has the higher 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 suffixes. These suffixes imply they are trustworthy sources of content 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 perfect example is Wikipedia as the web pages here are mostly authored by by tribes of people as opposed to a single source.
So it follows that authority is very heavily influenced by the source of your backlinks and if authoritative content link to you then you inherit their authority and in the eyes of Google you become more authoritative and hence the trust in your content by Google goes up.
How Google declares 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 an individual or a group manipulating the methods that Google uses in its efforts to try and regulate probably the most significant technological asset of this period in history.
How not to get Backlinks
And on this thought it’s worth my while stating some common sources and practices of building backlinks that Google not only dislikes but appears to be acting to ‘’categorize as negative authorities. In no particular order of severity, the prime examples are:
- Paid backlinks – web pages where individuals buy and sell backlinks
- Comment spam – entries that contain links on web pages that are just not related to the main theme.
- Low quality and *duplicate content – ‘scraped’ or copied
- Unnatural growth – there are a myriad of ways that this is achievable, Google isn’t dumb. Any sudden rise in the amount of backlinks is going to register on Google’s radar, especially 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 reputable press portals appear to get a lot of authority and I have definitely found significant numbers 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 usually expect to see. More on this is in a future post….