OK, 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 analysis at the Backlinks clinic:

Authority – simplified

The more authority your web pages have the better you will rank on Google. Authority means that people trust you and your content. The great news is that authorities trusted by people are also trusted by Google. A good illustration is the .edu and .gov suffixes. These domains imply they are credible 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 web pages. Another great example is Wikipedia as the entries here are almost always added by by group of humans as opposed to a single source.

So it follows that authority is very heavily influenced by the source of your backlinks and if authoritative sites link to your site 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 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

And on this thought it’s worth my while stating some distasteful sources and methods of creating backlinks that Google not only dislikes but appears to be moving aggressively to ‘’categorize as illegitimate authorities. In no particular order of merit, the prime examples are:

• Paid backlinks – places where people purchase and sell backlinks
• Comment spam – entries that contain links on blog pages that are just not related to the main theme.
• Low quality and *duplicate content – ‘scraped’ or otherwise
• Unnatural growth – there are plenty 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 radar, 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 key media portals appear to get a lot of authority and I have definitely found significant numbers 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 normal behaviors I normally expect to see. More on this is in a future post….