Google Authority & Backlinks do’s and don’ts

Saturday, November 14th, 2009 at 4:15 am

OK, this is a big concept and I want to emphasise it’s not clear cut. But here is what I know in my work at the Backlinks clinic:

Authority – simplified

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 trustworthy sources of content and it’s a proven fact that as far as Google is concerned backlinks from these web addresses to your web pages will send authority to your web pages. Another perfect example is Wikipedia as the web pages here are almost always contributed to by tribes of people as opposed to a single source.

So it follows that authority is very heavily influenced by the source of your backlinks and if authoritative web pages link to you then you receive their authority and as far as Google is concerned you become more authoritative and so the trust in your site by Google increases.

How Google determines what is and isn’t authoritative is a guarded secret for good reason and falls in line with Google’s thinking of “Do no evil”. The last thing the web needs is an individual or a group manipulating the mechanisms that Google employs in its efforts to try and regulate probably the most important technological resource of our times.

How not to get Authority and Backlinks

In the same vein it’s worth my while stating some common sources and practices of creating backlinks that Google not only dislikes but appears to be acting to ‘’categorize as illegitimate authorities. In no particular order of merit, the prime examples are:

Paid backlinks – web sites where people buy and sell backlinks
Comment spam – entries that contain links on blog pages that are just not associated to the main theme.
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 monitoring systems, specifically if it’s a brand new domain.
Backlinks from bad reputation web pages – these are particularly destructive as you are guilty by association – need I say more.

*There is another factor where I may be on shakey ground, but key media 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 monitoring this, only as a portion of of the results I am seeing go against the consistent behaviors I normally expect to see. More on this is in a future post….

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