How not to get backlinks
Phew, this is a multi-faceted 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 - explained
The more authority your site has the better you will rank on Google. Authority means that searchers trust you and your information. The good news is that authorities trusted by people are also recognised as trustworthy by Google. A good illustration is the .edu and .gov domain extensions. These suffixes imply they are authoratitive sources of information and it’s a proven 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 entries here are mostly added by by tribes of people as opposed to a single person.
So it follows that authority is largely influenced by the source of your backlinks and if authoritative sites link to your site then you receive their influence and in the eyes of Google you become more authoritative and hence the trust in your web pages by Google goes up.
How Google decides what is and isn’t authoritative is undisclosed for good reason and aligns with Google’s thinking of “Do no evil”. The last thing the Internet needs is someone exploiting the methods that Google employs in its efforts to try and regulate probably the most significant technological resource of this period in history.
Backlinking methods you should avoid
In the same vein it’s worth my while stating some obvious sources and methods of building backlinks that Google not only dislikes but appears to be moving aggressively to ‘classify’ as negative authorities. In no particular order of merit, the common offenders are:
- Paid backlinks – places where people buy and sell backlinks
- Comment spam – entries that have links on web sites that are just not associated to the main theme.
- Low quality and *duplicate content – ‘scraped’ or copied
- Unnatural growth – there are plenty of ways that this is achievable, Google isn’t stupid. Any sudden increase in the number of backlinks is going to register on Google’s radar, especially if it’s a brand new domain.
- Backlinks from bad reputation 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 key 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 defy the consistent behaviors I normally expect to see. More on this is in a future post….
