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

Authority – explained

The more authority your web pages have the higher you will rank on Google. Authority means that people trust you and your information. 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 credible 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 contribute authority to your web pages. Another good example is Wikipedia as the contents here are mostly added by by tribes of people as opposed to a single person.

So it follows that authority is largely influenced by the source of your backlinks and if authoritative sites link to you then you inherit their apparent trust and as far as Google is concerned you become more authoritative and so the trust in your web pages by Google increases.

How Google determines what is and isn’t authoritative is undisclosed for good reason and aligns with Google’s philosophy of “Do no evil”. The last thing the Internet needs is someone exploiting the methods that Google employs in its efforts to try and bring some order to probably the most important technological resource of our times.

How not to get Authority and Backlinks

And on this thought it’s worth my while stating some obvious sources and practices of creating backlinks that Google not only dislikes but appears to be moving aggressively to ‘classify’ as negative authorities. In no particular order of severity, the common examples are:

• Paid backlinks – hubs where people buy and sell backlinks
• Comment spam – entries that contain links on web pages that are just not related to the main content.
• Low quality and *duplicate content – ‘scraped’ or otherwise
• Fast 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 show up on Google’s monitoring systems, specifically if it’s a brand new domain.
• Backlinks from unscrupulous 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 properties appear to get a lot of authority and I have definitely discovered significant numbers of the same content 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 consistent behaviors I usually expect to see. More on this is in a future article….

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