Google authority explained and the wrong way to get backlinks

Posted by: Neil Robins on Thursday, December 3rd, 2009

OK, this is a immersive subject and I want to emphasise it’s not clear cut. But here is what I know in my analysis at the Backlinks clinic:

Authority – basics

The more authority your site has the better you will rank on Google. Authority means that people trust you and your information. The good news is that authorities trusted by people are also trusted by Google. A great example is the .edu and .gov domain extensions. These domains imply they are authoratitive sources of content and it’s an established fact that as far as Google is concerned backlinks from these domains to your site will contribute authority to your web pages. Another good example is Wikipedia as the contents here are almost always 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 influence and in the eyes of Google you become more authoritative and so the trust in your web pages by Google goes up.

How Google decides what is and isn’t authoritative is undisclosed for good reason and aligns with Google’s philosophy of “Do no evil”. The last thing the web needs is someone manipulating the formulae that Google untilzes in its efforts to try and regulate probably the most significant technological resource of this period in history.

How not to get Authority and Backlinks

And on this thought it’s worth my while stating some ‘black hat sources and practices of creating backlinks that Google not only dislikes but appears to be acting to ‘classify’ as negative authorities. In no particular order of severity, the prime offenders are:

Paid backlinks – places where people purchase and sell backlinks
Comment spam – entries that contain links on web sites that are just not associated to the main content.
Low quality and *duplicate content – ‘scraped’ or copied
Fast growth – there are plenty 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 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 key media properties seem to get a lot of authority and I have definitely observed significant quantities of the same article over and over again on different portals 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….