Phew, this is a big subject 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 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 recognised as trustworthy by Google. A good illustration is the .edu and .gov suffixes. These domains imply they are trustworthy sources of information and it’s a proven fact that in the eyes of Google backlinks from these web addresses to your web pages will “pass on” authority to your site. Another perfect example is Wikipedia as the entries here are mostly 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 sites link to you then you receive their influence and as far as Google is concerned you become more authoritative and so the trust in your content by Google goes up.

How Google pronounces what is and isn’t authoritative is undisclosed 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 employs in its efforts to try and bring some order to probably the most important technological development of this period in history.

How not to get Backlinks

In the same vein it’s worth my while stating some common sources and practices of creating backlinks that Google not only disapproves of but appears to be moving aggressively to ‘classify’ as negative authorities. In no particular order of merit, the prime examples are:

• Paid backlinks – places 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 otherwise
• Unnatural growth – there are plenty of ways that this is achievable, Google isn’t stupid. Any sudden rise in the amount of backlinks is going to register on Google’s monitoring systems, specifically if it’s a brand new 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 major media portals appear to get a lot of authority and I have definitely seen significant quantities of the same article over and over again on different portals with no penalties, I am still monitoring this, only as a percentage of the results I am seeing defy the normal behaviors I normally expect to see. More on this is in a future post….

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