Ways To Get Out Of Debt

Backlinks – use the wrong methods at your peril

December 3rd, 2009

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

Authority – simplified

The more authority your site has the higher you will rank on Google. Authority means that people trust you and your information. The great 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 trustworthy sources of content and it’s a proven fact that as far as Google is concerned backlinks from these web addresses to your site will “pass on” authority to your site. Another shining example is Wikipedia as the contents here are almost always added by by tribes of people as opposed to a single person.

So it follows that authority is very heavily influenced by the source of your backlinks and if authoritative web pages link to your web pages then you receive their authority and as far as Google is concerned you become more authoritative and hence the trust in your content by Google increases.

How Google determines what is and isn’t authoritative is a guarded secret for good reason and aligns with Google’s thinking of “Do no evil”. The last thing the Internet needs is an individual or a group exploiting the mechanisms that Google employs in its efforts to try and bring some order to probably the most significant technological resource of our times.

Backlinking methods you should avoid

And on this thought it’s valuable to state some ‘black hat sources and methods of acquiring backlinks that Google not only disapproves of but appears to be acting to ‘classify’ as illegitimate authorities. In no particular order of merit, the prime examples are:

Paid backlinks – web sites where individuals buy and sell backlinks
Comment spam – entries that contain links on web sites that are just not related to the main theme.
Low quality and *duplicate content – ‘scraped’ or copied
Rapid backlink 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, specifically if it’s a recently registered domain.
Backlinks from unscrupulous sites – 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 major press 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 normal behaviors I usually expect to see. More on this is in a future article….