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Phew, this is a multi-faceted concept and I want to emphasise it’s not clear cut. But here is what I know in my research at the Backlinks clinic:

Authority – basics

The more authority your site has the higher you will rank on Google. Authority means that people trust you and your information. The good 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 web pages. Another shining 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 influence and in the eyes of Google you become more authoritative and hence the trust in your web pages by Google goes up.

How Google pronounces 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 net needs is an individual or a group exploiting the methods that Google uses in its efforts to try and regulate probably the most important technological asset of our times.

How not to get Authority and Backlinks

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

• Paid backlinks – web pages where individuals purchase and sell backlinks
• Comment spam – entries that contain links on web sites that are just not related to the main content.
• Low quality and *duplicate content – ‘scraped’ or otherwise
• Rapid backlink growth – there are a large selection of ways that this is achievable, Google isn’t dumb. Any sudden increase in the amount of backlinks is going to show up on Google’s radar, specifically if it’s a brand new domain.
• Backlinks from ill reputed sites – these are particularly nasty as you are guilty by association – need I say more.

*There is another factor where I may be on shakey ground, but large media portals appear to get a lot of authority and I have definitely discovered significant numbers of the same article over and over again on different portals with no penalties, I am still monitoring this, only as a portion of of the results I am seeing defy the normal behaviors I usually expect to see. More on this is in a future article….