Website Marketing Skills For Small Businesses

Phew, this is a big concept and I want to emphasise it’s not an exact science. But here is what I have learned in my work at the Backlinks clinic:

Authority – basics

The more authority your site has the higher 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 domains imply they are trustworthy sources of content and it’s an established fact that in the eyes of Google backlinks from these domains to your web pages will send authority to your site. Another perfect example is Wikipedia as the entries here are largely contributed to by group of humans as opposed to a single person.

So it follows that authority is significantly influenced by the source of your backlinks and if authoritative web pages link to you then you inherit their authority and as far as Google is concerned you become more authoritative and so the trust in your content 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 uses in its efforts to try and bring some order to probably the most significant technological resource of our times.

How not to get Backlinks

In the same vein it’s worth my while stating some distasteful sources and methods of acquiring 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 – web pages where individuals purchase and sell backlinks
• Comment spam – entries that contain links on web pages that are just not related to the main content.
• Low quality and *duplicate content – ‘scraped’ or otherwise
• Fast growth – there are plenty of ways that this is achievable, Google isn’t dumb. Any sudden rise in the number of backlinks is going to show up on Google’s radar, especially if it’s a brand new domain.
• Backlinks from unscrupulous web pages – 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 key news portals seem to get a lot of authority and I have definitely observed significant quantities of the same article over and over again on different portals with no penalties, I am still looking at this, only as a percentage of the results I am seeing defy the normal behaviors I usually expect to see. More on this is in a future article….