Hmmmm, this is a multi-faceted subject and I want to emphasise it’s not an exact science. 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 people trust you and your content. The great 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 credible sources of content and it’s an established fact that in the eyes of Google backlinks from these domains to your web pages will send authority to your web pages. Another good example is Wikipedia as the entries here are mostly added by by tribes of people as opposed to a single source.

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

How Google determines what is and isn’t authoritative is kept secret for good reason and falls in line with Google’s philosophy of “Do no evil”. The last thing the web needs is someone manipulating the mechanisms that Google uses in its efforts to try and regulate probably the most significant technological resource of this period in history.

How not to get Backlinks

In the same vein it’s valuable to state some obvious sources and practices of creating backlinks that Google not only dislikes but appears to be acting to ‘’categorize as illegitimate authorities. In no particular order of merit, the common offenders are:

• Paid backlinks – web sites 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 otherwise
• Rapid backlink growth – there are a large selection of ways that this is achievable, Google isn’t dumb. Any sudden rise in the amount of backlinks is going to show up on Google’s radar, specifically if it’s a brand new domain.
• Backlinks from ill reputed 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 dodgy ground, but reputable news properties 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 monitoring 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 article….

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