Phew, this is a immersive concept and I want to emphasise it’s not clear cut. But here is what I know 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 people trust you and your content. The good news is that authorities trusted by humans are also recognised as trustworthy by Google. A good illustration is the .edu and .gov suffixes. These domains 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 web pages. Another shining example is Wikipedia as the entries here are almost always contributed to by tribes of humans as opposed to a single marketer.

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

How Google decides what is and isn’t authoritative is undisclosed for good reason and aligns with Google’s philosophy of “Do no evil”. The last thing the net needs is someone manipulating the formulae that Google uses in its efforts to try and regulate probably the most significant technological asset of our times.

How not to get Backlinks

In the same vein it’s worth my while stating some common sources and methods of creating 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 – hubs where people buy and sell backlinks
• Comment spam – entries that contain links on blog pages that are just not related to the main content.
• Low quality and *duplicate content – ‘scraped’ or otherwise
• Fast growth – there are plenty of ways that this is achievable, Google isn’t stupid. Any sudden rise in the number of backlinks propecia women is going to show up on Google’s radar, especially if it’s a brand new domain.
• Backlinks from ill reputed 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 properties appear to get a lot of authority and I have definitely discovered 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 percentage of the results I am seeing defy the normal behaviors I usually expect to see. More on this is in a future article….