OK, this is a big concept and I need to emphasise it’s not clear cut. But here is what I know in my work at the Backlinks clinic:

Authority – simplified

The more authority your site has the higher you will rank on Google. Authority means that people trust you and your content. The great 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 authoratitive sources of information and it’s a proven fact that in the eyes of Google backlinks from these domains to your site will send authority to your web pages. Another shining example is Wikipedia as the web pages here are largely added 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 web pages link to you then you receive their influence and in the eyes of Google you become more authoritative and hence the trust in your web pages 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 philosophy of “Do no evil”. The last thing the web needs is someone exploiting the mechanisms that Google employs in its efforts to try and regulate probably the most significant technological resource of this period in history.

Backlinking methods you should avoid

And on this thought it’s worth my while stating some underhand 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 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 associated 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 stupid. Any sudden rise in the number of backlinks is going to register on Google’s monitoring systems, especially if it’s a brand new domain.
• Backlinks from unscrupulous sites – 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 key media portals seem to get a lot of authority and I have definitely seen significant numbers of the same article over and over again on different web sites with no penalties, I am still monitoring this, only as a percentage of the results I am seeing defy the consistent behaviors I normally expect to see. More on this is in a future article….

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