Rules for getting backlinks
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Phew, this is a multi-faceted subject and I want to emphasise it’s not clear cut. But here is what I have learned in my research at the Backlinks clinic:
Authority – explained
The more authority your web pages have the higher you will rank on Google. Authority means that searchers trust you and your content. The good news is that authorities trusted by humans are also trusted by Google. A great example is the .edu and .gov suffixes. These suffixes imply they are authoratitive sources of content and it’s a proven fact that in the eyes of Google backlinks from these domains to your site will “pass on” authority to your web pages. Another shining example is Wikipedia as the contents here are mostly contributed to by tribes of people as opposed to a single person.
So it follows that authority is significantly influenced by the source of your backlinks and if authoritative web pages 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 web pages by Google increases.
How Google decides what is and isn’t authoritative is a guarded secret for solid reasons and falls in line with Google’s philosophy of “Do no evil”. The last thing the web needs is an individual or a group exploiting the formulae that Google uses in its efforts to try and regulate probably the most significant technological development of this period in history.
How not to get Backlinks
In the same vein it’s valuable to state some obvious sources and methods of creating backlinks that Google not only dislikes but appears to be acting to ‘classify’ as negative authorities. In no particular order of merit, the common examples are:
- Paid backlinks – places where individuals purchase and sell backlinks
- Comment spam – entries that have links on blog pages that are just not related to the main theme.
- Low quality and *duplicate content – ‘scraped’ or otherwise
- Fast growth – there are a large selection of ways that this is achievable, Google isn’t stupid. Any sudden increase in the amount of backlinks is going to show up on Google’s monitoring systems, especially if it’s a brand new domain.
- Backlinks from unscrupulous web pages – these are particularly nasty as you are guilty by association – need I say more.
*There is another factor where I may be on dodgy ground, but large news properties seem to get a lot of authority and I have definitely observed significant quantities of the same content over and over again on different web sites with no penalties, I am still monitoring this, only as some of the results I am seeing go against the normal behaviors I normally expect to see. More on this is in a future article….
