Using Backlinks to get Google Authority
Saturday, October 31st, 2009 Subscribe To Our Feed
Phew, this is a multi-faceted subject and I want to emphasise it’s not an exact science. But here is what I know in my analysis 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 great 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 credible sources of content and it’s an established fact that as far as Google is concerned backlinks from these web addresses to your web pages will “pass on” authority to your web pages. Another perfect example is Wikipedia as the web pages here are largely contributed to by group of humans 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 authority and in the eyes of Google you become more authoritative and hence the trust in your web pages by Google goes up.
How Google declares what is and isn’t authoritative is undisclosed for good reason and aligns with Google’s thinking of “Do no evil”. The last thing the Internet needs is someone exploiting the methods that Google uses in its efforts to try and regulate probably the most significant technological asset of our times.
Backlinking methods you should avoid
In the same vein it’s worth my while stating some obvious sources and practices of creating backlinks that Google not only disapproves of but appears to be acting to ‘’categorize as illegitimate authorities. In no particular order of merit, the common examples are:
- Paid backlinks – hubs where people purchase and sell backlinks
- Comment spam – entries that have links on blog pages that are just not associated to the main content.
- Low quality and *duplicate content – ‘scraped’ or otherwise
- Fast growth – there are a myriad 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 monitoring systems, specifically if it’s a recently registered domain.
- Backlinks from bad reputation sites – 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 media portals seem to get a lot of authority and I have definitely discovered significant numbers of the same article over and over again on different portals with no penalties, I am still monitoring this, only as some of the results I am seeing go against the consistent behaviors I usually expect to see. More on this is in a future article….
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