Google authority explained and the wrong way to get backlinks

Phew, this is a big subject and I need to emphasise it’s not an exact science. But here is what I have learned 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 people trust you and your content. The great news is that authorities trusted by humans are also recognised as trustworthy by Google. A great example is the .edu and .gov domain extensions. These domains imply they are credible sources of information and it’s a proven fact that in the eyes of Google backlinks from these domains to your site will contribute authority to your web pages. Another good example is Wikipedia as the contents here are mostly contributed to by group of humans as opposed to a single marketer.

So it follows that authority is very heavily 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 content by Google goes up.

How Google declares what is and isn’t authoritative is undisclosed for good reason and falls in line with Google’s philosophy of “Do no evil”. The last thing the Internet 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 our times.

How not to get Backlinks

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

• Paid backlinks – hubs where individuals 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 number of backlinks is going to register on Google’s radar, specifically if it’s a recently registered domain.
• Backlinks from unscrupulous 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 large press properties seem to get a lot of authority and I have definitely found significant numbers of the same article over and over again on different web sites with no penalties, I am still monitoring this, only as a percentage of the results I am seeing go against the consistent behaviors I normally expect to see. More on this is in a future article….