The link between backlinks and Google authority
Phew, this is a immersive subject and I want 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 great news is that authorities trusted by people are also recognised as trustworthy by Google. A good illustration is the .edu and .gov suffixes. These suffixes imply they are authoratitive sources of information and it’s a proven fact that in the eyes of Google backlinks from these domains to your web pages will send authority to your web pages. Another great example is Wikipedia as the entries here are almost always added by by tribes of people as opposed to a single person.
So it follows that authority is largely influenced by the source of your backlinks and if authoritative web pages link to you 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 kept secret for good reason and falls in line with Google’s thinking of “Do no evil”. The last thing the net needs is an individual or a group manipulating the formulae that Google uses in its efforts to try and bring some order to probably the most important technological resource of our times.
Backlinking methods you should avoid
And on this thought it’s valuable to state some distasteful sources and practices of acquiring backlinks that Google not only disapproves of but appears to be moving aggressively to ‘classify’ as negative authorities. In no particular order of merit, the common examples are:
- Paid backlinks – places where people buy and sell backlinks
- Comment spam – entries that contain links on blog pages that are just not associated to the main theme.
- Low quality and *duplicate content – ‘scraped’ or copied
- Rapid backlink growth – there are a large selection of ways that this is achievable, Google isn’t dumb. Any sudden increase in the number of backlinks is going to register on Google’s monitoring systems, especially if it’s a brand new domain.
- Backlinks from villainous sites – these are particularly henous as you are guilty by association - need I say more.
*There is another factor where I may be on shakey ground, but large news properties appear to get a lot of authority and I have definitely observed 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 percentage of the results I am seeing defy the consistent behaviors I usually expect to see. More on this is in a future article….
