Keyword Elite v2.0

Posts Tagged ‘Page Ranking’

OK, this is a big concept and I want to emphasise it’s not an exact science. But here is what I have learned in my analysis at the Backlinks clinic:

Authority - basics

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 humans are also trusted by Google. A good illustration is the .edu and .gov suffixes. These domains imply they are trustworthy sources of content and it’s an established fact that in the eyes of Google backlinks from these domains to your web pages will “pass on” authority to your web pages. Another shining example is Wikipedia as the web pages here are almost always added by by tribes of people as opposed to a single marketer.

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 apparent trust and in the eyes of Google you become more authoritative and hence the trust in your content by Google increases.

How Google pronounces what is and isn’t authoritative is undisclosed 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 manipulating the mechanisms that Google employs in its efforts to try and regulate probably the most significant technological asset of our times.

How not to get Authority and Backlinks

And on this thought it’s worth my while stating some distasteful sources and methods of building backlinks that Google not only disapproves of but appears to be acting to ‘classify’ as negative authorities. In no particular order of severity, the common examples are:

• Paid backlinks – web sites where people buy and sell backlinks
• Comment spam – entries that contain links on web sites that are just not associated to the main theme.
• Low quality and *duplicate content – ‘scraped’ or copied
• Unnatural growth – there are a large selection of ways that this is achievable, Google isn’t stupid. Any sudden rise in the amount of backlinks is going to register on Google’s monitoring systems, especially if it’s a brand new domain.
• Backlinks from unscrupulous 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 reputable news portals appear to get a lot of authority and I have definitely discovered significant numbers 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 go against the consistent behaviors I normally expect to see. More on this is in a future post….

Technorati Tags: backlinks, google, Page Ranking, Search Engine Optimisation, SEO, SEO marketing