Posts Tagged ‘Page Ranking’

Hmmmm, this is a immersive subject and I want to emphasise it’s not clear cut. But here is what I know in my analysis at the Backlinks clinic:

Authority – basics

The more authority your web pages have the better you will rank on Google. Authority means that people trust you and your content. 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 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 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 receive their authority and in the eyes of Google you become more authoritative and hence the trust in your site by Google increases.

How Google determines what is and isn’t authoritative is confidential for solid reasons and falls in line with Google’s philosophy of “Do no evil”. The last thing the net needs is an individual or a group manipulating the methods that Google uses in its efforts to try and bring some order to probably the most important technological asset of our times.

Backlinking methods you should avoid

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

• Paid backlinks – places where people buy 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 copied
• Unnatural growth – there are a large selection of ways that this is achievable, Google isn’t dumb. Any sudden increase in the number of backlinks is going to register on Google’s radar, especially if it’s a recently registered domain.
• Backlinks from villainous sites – 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 major news 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 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….

Technorati Tags: backlinks, google, Page Ranking, Search Engine Optimisation, SEO, SEO marketing