The link between backlinks and Google authority

bobbyjones| November 30, 2009 | No Comments

backlinks

Phew, this is a immersive concept and I need to emphasise it’s not an exact science. But here is what I know in my research at the Backlinks clinic:

Authority – explained

The more authority your web pages have the better 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 recognised as trustworthy by Google. A good illustration is the .edu and .gov suffixes. These suffixes imply they are trustworthy sources of content and it’s an established fact that as far as Google is concerned backlinks from these web addresses to your site will send authority to your web pages. Another shining example is Wikipedia as the web pages here are largely authored by by tribes of people as opposed to a single person.

So it follows that authority is significantly influenced by the source of your backlinks and if authoritative content link to your site then you receive their influence and in the eyes of Google you become more authoritative and hence the trust in your content by Google increases.

How Google determines what is and isn’t authoritative is a guarded secret for solid reasons and falls in line with Google’s thinking of “Do no evil”. The last thing the net needs is someone manipulating the methods that Google employs in its efforts to try and bring some order to probably the most important technological resource of our times.

How not to get Backlinks

And on this thought it’s worth my while stating some distasteful sources and methods of building backlinks that Google not only dislikes but appears to be acting to ‘’categorize as negative authorities. In no particular order of merit, the prime offenders are:

• Paid backlinks – web pages where people buy and sell backlinks
• Comment spam – entries that have links on web sites that are just not related to the main theme.
• Low quality and *duplicate content – ‘scraped’ or copied
• Unnatural growth – there are plenty of ways that this is achievable, Google isn’t stupid. Any sudden rise in the number of backlinks is going to register on Google’s monitoring systems, especially if it’s a brand new domain.
• Backlinks from ill reputed 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 reputable press properties appear to get a lot of authority and I have definitely discovered 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 consistent behaviors I usually expect to see. More on this is in a future post….

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