OK, this is a multi-faceted concept and I need to emphasise it’s not clear cut. But here is what I know in my work at the Backlinks clinic:
Authority – simplified
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 recognised as trustworthy by Google. A good illustration is the .edu and .gov suffixes. These domains imply they are authoratitive sources of content and it’s a proven 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 contents here are almost always added by by group 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 content 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 goes up.
How Google pronounces what is and isn’t authoritative is undisclosed for solid reasons and aligns with Google’s thinking of “Do no evil”. The last thing the web needs is an individual or a group manipulating the mechanisms that Google uses in its efforts to try and bring some order to probably the most important technological development of our times.
Backlinking methods you should avoid
In the same vein it’s valuable to state some ‘black hat sources and methods 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 – hubs where people buy and sell backlinks
- Comment spam – entries that contain links on blog 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 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 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 dodgy ground, but reputable news properties appear to get a lot of authority and I have definitely found significant quantities 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 defy the normal behaviors I normally expect to see. More on this is in a future article….
