OK, this is a immersive concept and I want to emphasise it’s not clear cut. But here is what I know in my research 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 information. The good news is that authorities trusted by humans are also trusted by Google. A good illustration is the .edu and .gov suffixes. These domains imply they are trustworthy sources of information 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 web pages. Another good example is Wikipedia as the contents here are mostly added by by tribes of people as opposed to a single marketer.

So it follows that authority is largely influenced by the source of your backlinks and if authoritative web pages link to your site then you inherit their influence 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 solid reasons 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 bring some order to probably the most significant technological development of our times.

How not to get Authority and Backlinks

In the same vein it’s worth my while stating some ‘black hat sources and practices of acquiring backlinks that Google not only disapproves of but appears to be moving aggressively to ‘classify’ as illegitimate authorities. In no particular order of merit, the common examples are:

• Paid backlinks – web pages where people purchase and sell backlinks
• Comment spam – entries that contain links on blog pages that are just not associated 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 stupid. Any sudden increase in the amount of backlinks is going to show up on Google’s monitoring systems, especially if it’s a brand new domain.
• Backlinks from villainous 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 major news properties appear to get a lot of authority and I have definitely found significant quantities of the same article over and over again on different web sites with no penalties, I am still looking at this, only as some of the results I am seeing defy the normal behaviors I normally expect to see. More on this is in a future article….

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