The link between backlinks and Google authority
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 work at the Backlinks clinic:
Authority – basics
The more authority your web pages have the higher you will rank on Google. Authority means that searchers trust you and your content. The good news is that authorities trusted by humans are also recognised as trustworthy 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 as far as Google is concerned backlinks from these domains to your site will “pass on” authority to your web pages. Another perfect example is Wikipedia as the entries here are largely contributed to by group of humans as opposed to a single source.
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 authority and as far as Google is concerned 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 aligns with Google’s thinking of “Do no evil”. The last thing the Internet needs is an individual or a group manipulating the methods that Google untilzes in its efforts to try and regulate probably the most important technological asset of this period in history.
How not to get Backlinks
And on this thought it’s valuable to state some underhand sources and practices of building backlinks that Google not only disapproves of but appears to be acting to ‘’categorize as negative 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 have links on web pages that are just not related to the main theme.
- Low quality and *duplicate content – ‘scraped’ or copied
- Unnatural growth – there are a myriad of ways that this is achievable, Google isn’t stupid. Any sudden rise in the number of backlinks is going to show up on Google’s monitoring systems, specifically if it’s a brand new domain.
- Backlinks from bad reputation 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 news properties seem to get a lot of authority and I have definitely discovered significant quantities of the same content 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 go against the consistent behaviors I usually expect to see. More on this is in a future article….
