OK, this is a multi-faceted subject and I want 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 searchers trust you and your content. The good news is that authorities trusted by people are also trusted by Google. A great example is the .edu and .gov suffixes. These domains imply they are trustworthy sources of content and it’s an established fact that in the eyes of Google backlinks from these web addresses to your web pages will send authority to your site. Another great example is Wikipedia as the contents here are almost always contributed to by group of humans as opposed to a single source.

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

How Google determines 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 an individual or a group manipulating the formulae that Google untilzes in its efforts to try and regulate probably the most significant technological asset of this period in history.

How not to get Authority and Backlinks

And on this thought it’s worth my while stating some obvious sources and methods 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 prime offenders are:

• Paid backlinks – hubs where individuals purchase 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 number of backlinks is going to show up on Google’s radar, especially 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 large news portals seem to get a lot of authority and I have definitely observed significant numbers of the same content over and over again on different web sites with no penalties, I am still monitoring this, only as a portion of of the results I am seeing go against the normal behaviors I normally expect to see. More on this is in a future article….