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

Authority – explained

The more authority your web pages have the higher you will rank on Google. Authority means that searchers 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 content and it’s a proven fact that as far as Google is concerned backlinks from these domains to your web pages will “pass on” authority to your web pages. Another perfect example is Wikipedia as the web pages here are largely added by 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 content 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 increases.

How Google determines 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 net needs is an individual or a group manipulating the methods that Google employs in its efforts to try and regulate probably the most significant technological resource of our times.

How not to get Authority and Backlinks

In the same vein it’s worth my while stating some common sources and practices of building 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 – places where people purchase and sell backlinks
• Comment spam – entries that have links on web pages that are just not associated to the main theme.
• Low quality and *duplicate content – ‘scraped’ or otherwise
• Rapid backlink 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, specifically if it’s a brand new 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 dodgy ground, but major press portals appear to get a lot of authority and I have definitely found significant numbers of the same content over and over again on different portals with no penalties, I am still looking at this, only as a portion of of the results I am seeing go against the normal behaviors I normally expect to see. More on this is in a future article….

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