Website Marketing Skills For Small Businesses

OK, this is a multi-faceted concept 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 good news is that authorities trusted by people are also recognised as trustworthy 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 as far as Google is concerned backlinks from these web addresses to your site will “pass on” authority to your web pages. Another good example is Wikipedia as the entries here are largely authored by by tribes 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 your web pages then you inherit their influence and as far as Google is concerned you become more authoritative and so the trust in your web pages by Google increases.

How Google decides what is and isn’t authoritative is undisclosed for good reason and falls in line with Google’s thinking of “Do no evil”. The last thing the web needs is an individual or a group manipulating the formulae that Google employs in its efforts to try and bring some order to probably the most important technological development of this period in history.

How not to get Backlinks

In the same vein it’s valuable to state some underhand sources and practices of building backlinks that Google not only dislikes but appears to be acting to ‘classify’ as negative authorities. In no particular order of merit, the prime offenders are:

• Paid backlinks – web pages where individuals purchase and sell backlinks
• Comment spam – entries that have links on web pages that are just not related to the main theme.
• Low quality and *duplicate content – ‘scraped’ or otherwise
• Rapid backlink growth – there are a large selection of ways that this is achievable, Google isn’t stupid. Any sudden rise in the number of backlinks is going to show up on Google’s radar, especially if it’s a recently registered domain.
• Backlinks from unscrupulous 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 dodgy ground, but key press portals appear to get a lot of authority and I have definitely seen significant numbers of the same article over and over again on different portals with no penalties, I am still monitoring this, only as a portion of of the results I am seeing defy the consistent behaviors I usually expect to see. More on this is in a future article….