Phew, 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 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 great news is that authorities trusted by people are also trusted by Google. A great example is the .edu and .gov domain extensions. These suffixes imply they are authoratitive sources of content and it’s a proven fact that in the eyes of Google backlinks from these domains to your web pages will “pass on” authority to your web pages. Another perfect example is Wikipedia as the entries here are largely added by by group of humans as opposed to a single marketer.

So it follows that authority is significantly influenced by the source of your backlinks and if authoritative content 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 decides what is and isn’t authoritative is a guarded secret for good reason and falls in line with Google’s philosophy 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 important technological resource of this period in history.

Backlinking methods you should avoid

In the same vein it’s valuable to state some distasteful sources and practices of acquiring backlinks that Google not only dislikes but appears to be moving aggressively to ‘’categorize as negative authorities. In no particular order of severity, the common offenders are:

• Paid backlinks – places where people 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 copied
• Rapid backlink growth – there are a large selection of ways that this is achievable, Google isn’t stupid. Any sudden rise in the amount of backlinks is going to show up on Google’s monitoring systems, specifically if it’s a recently registered domain.
• Backlinks from villainous sites – these are particularly nasty as you are guilty by association - need I say more.

*There is another factor where I may be on dodgy ground, but large media properties appear to get a lot of authority and I have definitely found significant quantities of the same article over and over again on different web sites with no penalties, I am still monitoring this, only as a portion of of the results I am seeing go against the normal behaviors I normally expect to see. More on this is in a future article….