Backlinks methods you should avoid
Phew, this is a big subject and I want to emphasise it’s not clear cut. But here is what I know 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 people trust you and your information. The great news is that authorities trusted by people are also recognised as trustworthy by Google. A good illustration is the .edu and .gov suffixes. These suffixes imply they are trustworthy sources of content and it’s an established fact that in the eyes of Google backlinks from these web addresses to your web pages will send authority to your site. Another shining example is Wikipedia as the web pages here are mostly contributed to by group of humans as opposed to a single marketer.
So it follows that authority is largely influenced by the source of your backlinks and if authoritative content link to your web pages then you inherit their apparent trust and in the eyes of Google you become more authoritative and hence the trust in your site by Google goes up.
How Google declares what is and isn’t authoritative is undisclosed for solid reasons and aligns with Google’s thinking of “Do no evil”. The last thing the web needs is an individual or a group manipulating the methods that Google uses in its efforts to try and bring some order to probably the most important technological asset of our times.
Backlinking methods you should avoid
In the same vein it’s worth my while stating some ‘black hat sources and practices of creating backlinks that Google not only dislikes but appears to be moving aggressively to ‘’categorize as illegitimate authorities. In no particular order of merit, the prime offenders are:
- Paid backlinks – places where individuals buy and sell backlinks
- Comment spam – entries that have links on web sites that are just not associated to the main content.
- Low quality and *duplicate content – ‘scraped’ or copied
- Rapid backlink growth – there are a myriad 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, specifically if it’s a recently registered domain.
- Backlinks from villainous 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 reputable media portals appear to get a lot of authority and I have definitely observed significant numbers of the same article 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 normally expect to see. More on this is in a future article….
