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 research at the Backlinks clinic:

Authority – explained

The more authority your site has the better you will rank on Google. Authority means that people trust you and your information. The good news is that authorities trusted by humans are also trusted by Google. A good illustration is the .edu and .gov domain extensions. 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 web pages will send authority to your site. Another perfect example is Wikipedia as the web pages here are mostly authored by by tribes of people as opposed to a single marketer.

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

How Google determines what is and isn’t authoritative is a guarded secret for solid reasons and aligns with Google’s thinking of “Do no evil”. The last thing the net needs is an individual or a group manipulating the formulae that Google untilzes in its efforts to try and regulate probably the most important technological resource of this period in history.

How not to get Authority and Backlinks

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

• Paid backlinks – hubs where people buy and sell backlinks
• Comment spam – entries that contain links on web pages that are just not related 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 increase in the number of backlinks is going to register on Google’s monitoring systems, specifically if it’s a recently registered domain.
• Backlinks from unscrupulous 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 news properties seem to get a lot of authority and I have definitely observed significant quantities of the same content over and over again on different portals with no penalties, I am still looking at this, only as some of the results I am seeing go against the normal behaviors I normally expect to see. More on this is in a future article….