Hmmmm, this is a big subject and I need to emphasise it’s not clear cut. But here is what I have learned in my research 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 great example is the .edu and .gov domain extensions. 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 web pages will “pass on” authority to your site. Another perfect example is Wikipedia as the contents here are mostly authored 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 sites link to your web pages then you receive their apparent trust and as far as Google is concerned you become more authoritative and so the trust in your site by Google increases.

How Google pronounces what is and isn’t authoritative is a guarded secret for good reason and falls in line with Google’s thinking of “Do no evil”. The last thing the Internet needs is an individual or a group manipulating the formulae that Google employs in its efforts to try and regulate probably the most important 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 building backlinks that Google not only dislikes but appears to be moving aggressively to ‘classify’ as illegitimate authorities. In no particular order of merit, the prime offenders are:

• Paid backlinks – web pages where people purchase and sell backlinks
• Comment spam – entries that have links on web sites that are just not associated to the main content.
• Low quality and *duplicate content – ‘scraped’ or copied
• Rapid backlink growth – there are plenty 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 radar, especially if it’s a recently registered domain.
• Backlinks from villainous web pages – these are particularly nasty as you are guilty by association – need I say more.

*There is another factor where I may be on shakey ground, but key press portals seem to get a lot of authority and I have definitely seen significant numbers 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 normal behaviors I normally expect to see. More on this is in a future post….