Phew, this is a big subject and it’s not clear cut. But here is what I know:

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 great example is the .edu and .gov domain extensions. 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 site. Another good example is Wikipedia as the content here is largely contributed to by groups of humans as opposed to a single marketer.

So it follows that authority is very heavily influenced by the source of your backlinks and if authoritative sites link to you then you inherit their influence and in the eyes of Google you become more authoritative and hence the trust in your site by Google increases.

How Google decides what is and isn’t authoritative is undisclosed for good reason and falls in line with Google’s philosophy of “Do no evil”. The last thing the net needs is someone exploiting the methods that Google uses to try and bring some order to probably the most important technological resource of our times.

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

• Paid backlinks – places where people buy and sell backlinks
• Comment spam – entries that contain links on web pages that are just not related to the main content
• Low quality and *duplicate content – ‘scraped’ or otherwise
• Rapid backlink growth – there are plenty of ways that this is achievable, Google isn’t stupid. Any sudden rise in the number of backlinks is going to show up on Google’s radar, especially if it’s a brand new 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 large news portals seem to get a lot of authority and I have definitely seen significant quantities of the same article over and over again on different portals with no penalties, I still looking at this, only as some of the results I am seeing defy the consistent behaviors I normally expect to see. More on this is a future post….

In the next part I will write about how you should think strategically about getting authority and what you can do about it. But as always I will say that if you sign up to my mailing list then I will be reviewing some tools that significantly help (by substantial orders of magnitude) decrease the time and effort to achieve authority.

Until then…. Nick

Technorati Tags: Back Links Authority, Google Authority (a.k.a Trust)

Posted in: backlinks - FAQ & Education |