online business weblogThis Is Future Internet Marketing

Hmmmm, this is a multi-faceted concept and I need to emphasise it’s not an exact science. But here is what I know in my research at the Backlinks clinic:

Authority – basics

The more authority your site has the better you will rank on Google. Authority means that searchers trust you and your content. The great news is that authorities trusted by people are also recognised as trustworthy by Google. A good illustration is the .edu and .gov suffixes. These suffixes imply they are trustworthy 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 send authority to your site. Another shining example is Wikipedia as the web pages here are mostly added 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 content link to your web pages then you receive their influence and as far as Google is concerned you become more authoritative and hence the trust in your content by Google increases.

How Google pronounces what is and isn’t authoritative is a guarded secret for solid reasons and falls in line with Google’s philosophy of “Do no evil”. The last thing the Internet needs is an individual or a group exploiting the mechanisms that Google uses in its efforts to try and regulate probably the most significant technological resource of our times.

Backlinking methods you should avoid

In the same vein it’s valuable to state some ‘black hat sources and methods of creating backlinks that Google not only disapproves of but appears to be moving aggressively to ‘classify’ as negative authorities. In no particular order of severity, the prime examples are:

• Paid backlinks – hubs where individuals buy and sell backlinks
• Comment spam – entries that have 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 stupid. Any sudden increase in the amount of backlinks is going to register on Google’s radar, especially 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 appear to get a lot of authority and I have definitely seen significant numbers of the same article over and over again on different web sites with no penalties, I am still monitoring this, only as a percentage of the results I am seeing go against the consistent behaviors I usually expect to see. More on this is in a future post….