Phew, this is a multi-faceted subject and I want to emphasise it’s not clear cut. But here is what I know 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 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 domains imply they are authoratitive sources of information and it’s an established fact that in the eyes of Google backlinks from these domains to your site will “pass on” authority to your site. Another great example is Wikipedia as the entries here are largely added by by tribes of people 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 receive 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 declares 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 Internet needs is someone exploiting the mechanisms that Google uses in its efforts to try and bring some order to probably the most important technological development of our times.

How not to get Backlinks

And on this thought it’s valuable to state some distasteful sources and practices of creating backlinks that Google not only dislikes but appears to be acting to ‘’categorize as illegitimate authorities. In no particular order of severity, the common examples are:

• Paid backlinks – web sites where people buy and sell backlinks
• Comment spam – entries that have links on web sites that are just not related to the main content.
• Low quality and *duplicate content – ‘scraped’ or otherwise
• Unnatural growth – there are plenty of ways that this is achievable, Google isn’t dumb. Any sudden increase in the amount of backlinks is going to register on Google’s radar, specifically if it’s a brand new domain.
• Backlinks from villainous 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 key press properties seem to get a lot of authority and I have definitely found significant numbers of the same content over and over again on different web sites with no penalties, I am still looking at this, only as a portion of of the results I am seeing go against the consistent behaviors I usually expect to see. More on this is in a future post….

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