The link between backlinks and Google authority
November 9th, 2009
OK, this is a multi-faceted 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 content. The great news is that authorities trusted by humans are also trusted by Google. A great example is the .edu and .gov domain extensions. These domains imply they are credible sources of information 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 entries here are almost always added by by tribes of people as opposed to a single source.
So it follows that authority is very heavily influenced by the source of your backlinks and if authoritative web pages link to your site then you receive their apparent trust and in the eyes of Google you become more authoritative and hence the trust in your web pages by Google increases.
How Google declares what is and isn’t authoritative is a guarded secret for solid reasons and falls in line with Google’s philosophy of “Do no evil”. The last thing the web needs is an individual or a group manipulating the mechanisms that Google untilzes in its efforts to try and bring some order to probably the most significant technological development of this period in history.
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How not to get Backlinks
And on this thought it’s valuable to state some common sources and methods of acquiring backlinks that Google not only disapproves of but appears to be acting to ‘’categorize as illegitimate authorities. In no particular order of merit, the prime examples are:
- Paid backlinks – web pages where people buy and sell backlinks
- Comment spam – entries that contain links on web sites that are just not related to the main content.
- Low quality and *duplicate content – ‘scraped’ or otherwise
- Unnatural growth – there are a myriad of ways that this is achievable, Google isn’t stupid. 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 shakey ground, but major media portals appear to get a lot of authority and I have definitely discovered significant quantities of the same article 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….
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