backlinks clinic

OK, this is a multi-faceted subject 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 better you will rank on Google. Authority means that people trust you and your information. The good 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 authoratitive 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 shining example is Wikipedia as the web pages here are mostly authored by by group of people as opposed to a single person.

So it follows that authority is very heavily influenced by the source of your backlinks and if authoritative sites link to you then you inherit their authority and in the eyes of Google you become more authoritative and hence the trust in your content by Google goes up.

How Google pronounces what is and isn’t authoritative is undisclosed for good reason 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 uses in its efforts to try and bring some order to probably the most significant technological asset of this period in history.

How not to get Backlinks

In the same vein it’s worth my while stating some distasteful sources and methods of acquiring backlinks that Google not only dislikes but appears to be moving aggressively to ‘classify’ as negative authorities. In no particular order of merit, the common offenders are:

• Paid backlinks – places where individuals purchase and sell backlinks
• Comment spam – entries that have links on web pages that are just not associated to the main theme.
• Low quality and *duplicate content – ‘scraped’ or otherwise
• Rapid backlink growth – there are a myriad of ways that this is achievable, Google isn’t dumb. Any sudden rise in the amount of backlinks is going to register on Google’s monitoring systems, specifically if it’s a brand new domain.
• Backlinks from ill reputed sites – these are particularly henous as you are guilty by association – need I say more.

*There is another factor where I may be on shakey ground, but large press portals appear to get a lot of authority and I have definitely discovered significant numbers 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 defy the normal behaviors I normally expect to see. More on this is in a future article….