How you shouldn’t acquire backlinks

backlinks clinic

Phew, this is a multi-faceted 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 site has the higher you will rank on Google. Authority means that searchers trust you and your information. The great news is that authorities trusted by humans are also trusted by Google. A good illustration is the .edu and .gov suffixes. These suffixes imply they are credible sources of information and it’s a proven fact that as far as Google is concerned backlinks from these web addresses to your web pages will contribute authority to your web pages. Another good example is Wikipedia as the contents here are largely authored by 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 web pages link to your site then you receive their authority and in the eyes of Google you become more authoritative and so the trust in your content by Google goes up.

How Google determines what is and isn’t authoritative is undisclosed for good reason and falls in line with Google’s philosophy of “Do no evil”. The last thing the net needs is an individual or a group manipulating the methods that Google employs in its efforts to try and bring some order to probably the most important technological resource of our times.

How not to get Authority and Backlinks

In the same vein it’s valuable to state some common sources and practices of building backlinks that Google not only disapproves of but appears to be moving aggressively to ‘classify’ as negative authorities. In no particular order of merit, the common examples are:

• Paid backlinks – hubs where people purchase 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
• Rapid backlink growth – there are a large selection of ways that this is achievable, Google isn’t dumb. Any sudden increase in the amount of backlinks is going to register on Google’s radar, especially if it’s a brand new domain.
• Backlinks from ill reputed 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 large news portals seem to get a lot of authority and I have definitely discovered significant numbers of the same content over and over again on different web sites with no penalties, I am still monitoring this, only as a portion of of the results I am seeing go against the normal behaviors I normally expect to see. More on this is in a future post….

Tagged with: backlinks • google • Page Ranking • search engine optimisation • SEO • SEO marketing

Filed under: Article Marketing • Blogging • internet marketing • marketing tips

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