How not to get backlinks
Phew, this is a big concept and I want to emphasise it’s not clear cut. But here is what I know in my analysis 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 content. 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 domains imply they are credible sources of information and it’s an established fact that in the eyes of Google backlinks from these domains to your site will send authority to your site. Another shining example is Wikipedia as the web pages here are mostly added 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 sites link to your site then you receive their apparent trust and in the eyes of Google you become more authoritative and hence the trust in your site by Google increases.
How Google decides what is and isn’t authoritative is a guarded secret for solid reasons and falls in line with Google’s philosophy of “Do no evil”. The last thing the Internet needs is an individual or a group manipulating the formulae that Google untilzes 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 methods of building backlinks that Google not only disapproves of but appears to be acting to ‘classify’ as illegitimate authorities. In no particular order of merit, the prime offenders are:
- Paid backlinks – hubs where people purchase and sell backlinks
- Comment spam – entries that contain links on web pages that are just not associated to the main theme.
- Low quality and *duplicate content – ‘scraped’ or otherwise
- Unnatural growth – there are plenty of ways that this is achievable, Google isn’t stupid. Any sudden rise in the amount of backlinks is going to register on Google’s radar, specifically if it’s a recently registered domain.
- Backlinks from unscrupulous 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 media properties appear to get a lot of authority and I have definitely seen significant numbers of the same article 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 go against the normal behaviors I normally expect to see. More on this is in a future post….
