Using Backlinks to get Google Authority
Hmmmm, this is a immersive concept and I want to emphasise it’s not clear cut. But here is what I know in my analysis at the Backlinks clinic:
Authority – basics
The more authority your web pages have the better you will rank on Google. Authority means that searchers trust you and your information. The great news is that authorities trusted by people are also trusted by Google. A great example is the .edu and .gov domain extensions. These suffixes imply they are trustworthy 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 “pass on” authority to your site. Another perfect example is Wikipedia as the entries here are largely contributed to 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 your site then you inherit their influence and in the eyes of Google 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 solid reasons and aligns with Google’s thinking of “Do no evil”. The last thing the Internet needs is someone exploiting the mechanisms that Google untilzes in its efforts to try and bring some order to probably the most important technological development of this period in history.
Backlinking methods you should avoid
In the same vein it’s valuable to state some common sources and methods of creating backlinks that Google not only dislikes but appears to be acting to ‘’categorize as negative authorities. In no particular order of merit, the prime offenders are:
- Paid backlinks – web sites where people 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
- Fast growth – there are plenty 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 monitoring systems, especially if it’s a recently registered 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 dodgy ground, but large press properties appear to get a lot of authority and I have definitely seen significant quantities of the same article 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 go against the normal behaviors I normally expect to see. More on this is in a future article….
