Blogackers

OK, this is a immersive concept and I need to emphasise it’s not an exact science. But here is what I have learned in my analysis at the Backlinks clinic:

Authority - basics

The more authority your site has the higher you will rank on Google. Authority means that people trust you and your information. The great 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 credible sources of information and it’s an established fact that as far as Google is concerned backlinks from these web addresses to your site will send authority to your site. Another good example is Wikipedia as the contents here are mostly authored by by tribes of people as opposed to a single person.

So it follows that authority is largely influenced by the source of your backlinks and if authoritative web pages link to you then you inherit their apparent trust 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 employs 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 common sources and methods of creating backlinks that Google not only disapproves of but appears to be acting to ‘’categorize as illegitimate authorities. In no particular order of merit, the common offenders are:

• Paid backlinks – web pages where people purchase 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 copied
• Unnatural 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 show up on Google’s radar, specifically if it’s a recently registered domain.
• Backlinks from villainous web pages – 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 press properties seem to get a lot of authority and I have definitely seen significant quantities of the same content over and over again on different portals with no penalties, I am still monitoring this, only as a percentage of the results I am seeing defy the consistent behaviors I usually expect to see. More on this is in a future post….