Backlinks methods you should avoid
Hmmmm, this is a big subject and I want to emphasise it’s not an exact science. But here is what I have learned in my research at the Backlinks clinic:
Authority – basics
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 trusted by Google. A great example is the .edu and .gov domain extensions. 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 site. Another perfect example is Wikipedia as the web pages here are almost always authored by by tribes of people as opposed to a single source.
So it follows that authority is significantly influenced by the source of your backlinks and if authoritative content link to your site then you receive their influence and in the eyes of Google you become more authoritative and so the trust in your web pages by Google increases.
How Google declares what is and isn’t authoritative is a guarded secret for solid reasons and falls in line with Google’s thinking of “Do no evil”. The last thing the net needs is someone exploiting the mechanisms that Google untilzes in its efforts to try and regulate probably the most significant technological development of this period in history.
How not to get Backlinks
And on this thought it’s valuable to state some obvious sources and methods of building backlinks that Google not only disapproves of but appears to be moving aggressively to ‘’categorize as illegitimate authorities. In no particular order of severity, the common offenders are:
- Paid backlinks – web sites where individuals buy and sell backlinks
- Comment spam – entries that have links on web sites that are just not related to the main theme.
- Low quality and *duplicate content – ‘scraped’ or copied
- Fast 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 brand new domain.
- Backlinks from villainous sites – 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 reputable news properties seem to get a lot of authority and I have definitely seen significant numbers of the same content over and over again on different web sites with no penalties, I am still looking at this, only as a portion of of the results I am seeing defy the normal behaviors I normally expect to see. More on this is in a future article….
