backlinks

Hmmmm, this is a big concept and I need to emphasise it’s not clear cut. But here is what I have learned in my analysis at the Backlinks clinic:

Authority - simplified

The more authority your site has the higher you will rank on Google. Authority means that searchers trust you and your information. The good news is that authorities trusted by humans are also recognised as trustworthy by Google. A good illustration is the .edu and .gov domain extensions. These suffixes imply they are authoratitive sources of information and it’s a proven fact that in the eyes of Google backlinks from these domains to your web pages will contribute authority to your web pages. Another perfect example is Wikipedia as the entries here are largely contributed to by group of humans as opposed to a single source.

So it follows that authority is significantly influenced by the source of your backlinks and if authoritative web pages link to your web pages 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 determines what is and isn’t authoritative is undisclosed for solid reasons and falls in line with Google’s philosophy of “Do no evil”. The last thing the net needs is someone manipulating the methods that Google employs in its efforts to try and bring some order to probably the most significant technological asset of this period in history.

How not to get Backlinks

In the same vein it’s valuable to state some ‘black hat 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 severity, 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 copied
  • Unnatural growth – there are plenty of ways that this is achievable, Google isn’t dumb. Any sudden increase in the number of backlinks is going to show up on Google’s monitoring systems, especially if it’s a recently registered domain.
  • Backlinks from ill reputed 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 shakey ground, but large press portals seem to get a lot of authority and I have definitely observed significant quantities of the same article over and over again on different portals with no penalties, I am still looking at this, only as a percentage of the results I am seeing defy the normal behaviors I usually expect to see. More on this is in a future article….

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Filed under: Article Marketing • Article Writing • PLR Articles

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