How you shouldn’t acquire backlinks
Phew, this is a multi-faceted concept and I want to emphasise it’s not an exact science. But here is what I know in my research at the Backlinks clinic:
Authority - simplified
The more authority your web pages have the higher you will rank on Google. Authority means that searchers trust you and your content. The great news is that authorities trusted by people are also trusted by Google. A great example is the .edu and .gov domain extensions. These suffixes 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 web pages will send authority to your web pages. Another great example is Wikipedia as the entries here are almost always contributed to by group of humans as opposed to a single person.
So it follows that authority is significantly influenced by the source of your backlinks and if authoritative content link to your web pages then you receive 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 determines what is and isn’t authoritative is confidential for good reason and falls in line with Google’s philosophy of “Do no evil”. The last thing the web needs is an individual or a group manipulating the mechanisms that Google untilzes 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 common sources and practices of building backlinks that Google not only dislikes but appears to be acting to ‘classify’ as negative authorities. In no particular order of merit, the common examples are:
- Paid backlinks – places where people buy and sell backlinks
- Comment spam – entries that have links on web pages that are just not associated to the main theme.
- Low quality and *duplicate content – ‘scraped’ or otherwise
- Fast growth – there are a myriad of ways that this is achievable, Google isn’t dumb. Any sudden rise in the amount of backlinks is going to show up on Google’s radar, especially if it’s a brand new domain.
- Backlinks from bad reputation 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 key media portals appear to get a lot of authority and I have definitely seen significant numbers of the same article over and over again on different web sites with no penalties, I am still monitoring this, only as a portion of of the results I am seeing go against the normal behaviors I normally expect to see. More on this is in a future post….
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