Phew, this is a multi-faceted concept and I need 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 information. The good 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 authoratitive sources of content and it’s an established fact that as far as Google is concerned backlinks from these web addresses to your site will “pass on” authority to your site. Another shining example is Wikipedia as the web pages here are mostly authored 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 sites link to your site then you receive their influence and as far as Google is concerned you become more authoritative and so the trust in your content by Google increases.

How Google determines what is and isn’t authoritative is kept secret for solid reasons and falls in line with Google’s thinking of “Do no evil”. The last thing the web needs is someone exploiting the mechanisms that Google untilzes in its efforts to try and regulate probably the most important technological asset of this period in history.

Backlinking methods you should avoid

And on this thought it’s worth my while stating some ‘black hat sources and methods of creating backlinks that Google not only dislikes but appears to be moving aggressively to ‘classify’ as illegitimate authorities. In no particular order of severity, the common examples are:

• Paid backlinks – hubs 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 otherwise
• Fast growth – there are plenty of ways that this is achievable, Google isn’t dumb. Any sudden rise in the number of backlinks is going to register on Google’s monitoring systems, especially if it’s a brand new domain.
• Backlinks from villainous sites – these are particularly henous as you are guilty by association - need I say more.

*There is another factor where I may be on dodgy ground, but key news properties appear to get a lot of authority and I have definitely observed significant numbers of the same content over and over again on different portals with no penalties, I am still looking at this, only as some of the results I am seeing go against the consistent behaviors I usually expect to see. More on this is in a future post….