Using Backlinks to get Google Authority
OK, this is a big 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 – basics
The more authority your site has the better you will rank on Google. Authority means that people trust you and your content. The good news is that authorities trusted by humans are also trusted by Google. A good illustration is the .edu and .gov suffixes. These suffixes 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 web pages will “pass on” authority to your web pages. Another perfect example is Wikipedia as the entries here are largely contributed to by group of humans as opposed to a single person.
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 authority and as far as Google is concerned you become more authoritative and so the trust in your content by Google goes up.
How Google pronounces what is and isn’t authoritative is confidential 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 methods that Google employs in its efforts to try and regulate probably the most significant technological resource of this period in history.
Backlinking methods you should avoid
In the same vein it’s worth my while stating some ‘black hat sources and methods of acquiring backlinks that Google not only dislikes but appears to be acting to ‘’categorize as illegitimate authorities. In no particular order of merit, the prime examples are:
- Paid backlinks – web sites where people buy and sell backlinks
- Comment spam – entries that have links on web pages that are just not related to the main content.
- Low quality and *duplicate content – ‘scraped’ or copied
- Fast 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, especially if it’s a recently registered 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 key media properties appear to get a lot of authority and I have definitely found significant numbers of the same article over and over again on different portals with no penalties, I am still monitoring this, only as a percentage of the results I am seeing go against the normal behaviors I normally expect to see. More on this is in a future post….