Phew, this is a multi-faceted subject and I want to emphasise it’s not clear cut. But here is what I have learned in my research at the Backlinks clinic:
Authority – explained
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 humans are also trusted by Google. A great example is the .edu and .gov suffixes. These suffixes imply they are trustworthy sources of information and it’s a proven fact that as far as Google is concerned backlinks from these domains to your site will contribute authority to your site. Another shining example is Wikipedia as the web pages here are almost always contributed to by tribes of humans as opposed to a single source.
So it follows that authority is largely influenced by the source of your backlinks and if authoritative sites link to your web pages then you inherit their influence and in the eyes of Google you become more authoritative and hence the trust in your site by Google goes up.
How Google determines what is and isn’t authoritative is confidential for good reason and falls in line with Google’s thinking of “Do no evil”. The last thing the web needs is an individual or a group manipulating the methods that Google employs in its efforts to try and regulate probably the most significant technological resource of our times.
Backlinking methods you should avoid
And on this thought it’s valuable to state some ‘black hat sources and practices of building backlinks that Google not only dislikes but appears to be moving aggressively to ‘classify’ as negative authorities. In no particular order of merit, the prime examples are:
- Paid backlinks – web sites where people buy and sell backlinks
- Comment spam – entries that have links on blog pages that are just not associated to the main theme.
- Low quality and *duplicate content – ‘scraped’ or copied
- Unnatural growth – there are a large selection of ways that this is achievable, Google isn’t dumb. Any sudden increase in the amount of backlinks is going to show up on Google’s radar, especially if it’s a brand new domain.
- Backlinks from bad reputation web pages – 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 found significant numbers of the same article over and over again on different portals with no penalties, I am still looking at this, only as a percentage of the results I am seeing go against the normal behaviors I usually expect to see. More on this is in a future post….
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