How you shouldn’t acquire backlinks
Hmmmm, this is a multi-faceted subject and I want to emphasise it’s not clear cut. But here is what I know in my work at the Backlinks clinic:
Authority – explained
The more authority your site has the better 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 good illustration is the .edu and .gov suffixes. These suffixes imply they are authoratitive sources of information and it’s a proven fact that as far as Google is concerned backlinks from these domains to your site will contribute authority to your site. Another perfect example is Wikipedia as the contents here are almost always added by by tribes of people as opposed to a single source.
So it follows that authority is significantly 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 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 Internet needs is someone manipulating the methods that Google untilzes in its efforts to try and bring some order to probably the most important technological resource of our times.
Backlinking methods you should avoid
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 ‘’categorize as negative authorities. In no particular order of merit, the prime examples are:
- Paid backlinks – web pages where people buy and sell backlinks
- Comment spam – entries that have links on web pages that are just not related to the main theme.
- Low quality and *duplicate content – ‘scraped’ or copied
- Rapid backlink growth – there are a large selection of ways that this is achievable, Google isn’t dumb. Any sudden rise in the number of backlinks is going to register on Google’s radar, specifically if it’s a brand new domain.
- Backlinks from bad reputation web pages – these are particularly destructive as you are guilty by association – need I say more.
*There is another factor where I may be on shakey ground, but major media properties seem to get a lot of authority and I have definitely found significant quantities of the same content over and over again on different web sites with no penalties, I am still looking at this, only as a portion of of the results I am seeing go against the consistent behaviors I normally expect to see. More on this is in a future article….
