Backlinks – use the wrong methods at your peril
OK, this is a big concept and I need to emphasise it’s not an exact science. But here is what I know in my research at the Backlinks clinic:
Authority – explained
The more authority your web pages have the better you will rank on Google. Authority means that people trust you and your content. The good news is that authorities trusted by humans are also trusted by Google. A great example is the .edu and .gov suffixes. These suffixes imply they are trustworthy sources of information and it’s a proven fact that in the eyes of Google backlinks from these domains to your site will “pass on” authority to your site. Another good example is Wikipedia as the contents here are almost always 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 sites link to your web pages 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 goes up.
How Google pronounces what is and isn’t authoritative is undisclosed 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 employs in its efforts to try and bring some order to probably the most significant technological resource of this period in history.
How not to get Authority and Backlinks
And on this thought it’s valuable to state some common sources and practices of acquiring backlinks that Google not only disapproves of but appears to be acting to ‘’categorize as negative authorities. In no particular order of merit, the common examples are:
- Paid backlinks – places where people buy and sell backlinks
- Comment spam – entries that contain links on blog pages that are just not associated to the main content.
- Low quality and *duplicate content – ‘scraped’ or otherwise
- Fast growth – there are a large selection of ways that this is achievable, Google isn’t dumb. Any sudden rise in the number of backlinks is going to show up on Google’s radar, specifically if it’s a recently registered domain.
- Backlinks from villainous 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 major media properties seem to get a lot of authority and I have definitely found significant quantities of the same content over and over again on different portals 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 article….