How you shouldn’t acquire backlinks
OK, this is a multi-faceted subject and I want to emphasise it’s not clear cut. But here is what I know in my analysis 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 content. The great news is that authorities trusted by people are also trusted by Google. A great example is the .edu and .gov suffixes. These domains imply they are credible 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 site. Another perfect example is Wikipedia as the web pages here are largely contributed to by group 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 sites link to your site then you receive their authority and in the eyes of Google you become more authoritative and hence the trust in your site by Google goes up.
How Google decides what is and isn’t authoritative is a guarded secret for good reason and aligns with Google’s thinking of “Do no evil”. The last thing the web needs is someone exploiting the mechanisms that Google employs in its efforts to try and regulate probably the most important technological resource of this period in history.
How not to get Backlinks
And on this thought it’s worth my while stating some common sources and methods of building backlinks that Google not only dislikes but appears to be acting to ‘classify’ as illegitimate authorities. In no particular order of severity, the common offenders are:
- Paid backlinks – web sites where people purchase and sell backlinks
- Comment spam – entries that contain links on blog pages that are just not associated to the main content.
- Low quality and *duplicate content – ‘scraped’ or copied
- Unnatural growth – there are a myriad of ways that this is achievable, Google isn’t dumb. Any sudden increase in the number of backlinks is going to register on Google’s radar, especially if it’s a recently registered domain.
- Backlinks from bad reputation 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 press properties appear to get a lot of authority and I have definitely discovered significant numbers of the same content over and over again on different portals 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….
