Phew, this is a multi-faceted concept and I need 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 content. The good news is that authorities trusted by humans are also trusted by Google. A good illustration is the .edu and .gov suffixes. These suffixes imply they are authoratitive sources of content and it’s an established fact that as far as Google is concerned backlinks from these web addresses to your site will “pass on” authority to your web pages. Another good example is Wikipedia as the contents here are mostly added by by tribes of humans as opposed to a single person.

So it follows that authority is largely influenced by the source of your backlinks and if authoritative content link to you then you receive their apparent trust and in the eyes of Google you become more authoritative and so the trust in your site by Google increases.

How Google declares what is and isn’t authoritative is confidential for good reason and falls in line with Google’s philosophy of “Do no evil”. The last thing the Internet needs is an individual or a group manipulating the formulae that Google untilzes in its efforts to try and regulate probably the most significant technological asset of this period in history.

How not to get Backlinks

And on this thought it’s worth my while stating some underhand sources and practices of building 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 – hubs where people purchase and sell backlinks
• Comment spam – entries that contain links on web pages that are just not associated to the main theme.
• Low quality and *duplicate content – ‘scraped’ or copied
• Fast growth – there are plenty of ways that this is achievable, Google isn’t stupid. Any sudden increase in the number of backlinks is going to register on Google’s monitoring systems, specifically if it’s a brand new domain.
• Backlinks from unscrupulous sites – these are particularly destructive as you are guilty by association – need I say more.

*There is another factor where I may be on dodgy ground, but large press properties seem to get a lot of authority and I have definitely discovered significant quantities of the same article 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 consistent behaviors I normally expect to see. More on this is in a future post….