Google Authority and Backlinks
OK, this is a big subject and I want to emphasise it’s not an exact science. But here is what I have learned in my work at the Backlinks clinic:
Authority - simplified
The more authority your web pages have the higher 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 credible sources of information and it’s a proven fact that in the eyes of Google backlinks from these domains to your site will contribute authority to your site. Another great example is Wikipedia as the contents here are largely authored by by group of humans as opposed to a single person.
So it follows that authority is very heavily influenced by the source of your backlinks and if authoritative web pages link to you then you receive their apparent trust 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 pronounces what is and isn’t authoritative is a guarded secret for good reason and falls in line with Google’s philosophy of “Do no evil”. The last thing the Internet needs is an individual or a group manipulating the formulae that Google uses in its efforts to try and bring some order to probably the most important technological asset of our times.
Backlinking methods you should avoid
In the same vein it’s valuable to state some ‘black hat sources and methods of building backlinks that Google not only disapproves of but appears to be acting to ‘classify’ as illegitimate authorities. In no particular order of severity, the prime examples are:
- Paid backlinks – web sites where individuals buy and sell backlinks
- Comment spam – entries that have links on web pages that are just not related to the main content.
- Low quality and *duplicate content – ‘scraped’ or otherwise
- Rapid backlink growth – there are a large selection of ways that this is achievable, Google isn’t stupid. Any sudden increase in the amount of backlinks is going to register on Google’s radar, specifically if it’s a brand new domain.
- Backlinks from ill reputed 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 press properties seem 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 go against the consistent behaviors I usually expect to see. More on this is in a future post….