How not to get backlinks
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 work at the Backlinks clinic:
Authority – basics
The more authority your web pages have the better you will rank on Google. Authority means that searchers trust you and your content. The great 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 domains imply they are credible sources of information and it’s an established fact that as far as Google is concerned backlinks from these web addresses to your web pages will contribute authority to your web pages. Another good example is Wikipedia as the contents here are mostly contributed to by tribes of people as opposed to a single source.
So it follows that authority is largely influenced by the source of your backlinks and if authoritative web pages link to your web pages then you inherit their authority and in the eyes of Google you become more authoritative and hence the trust in your site by Google goes up.
How Google declares what is and isn’t authoritative is kept secret for solid reasons and falls in line with Google’s philosophy of “Do no evil”. The last thing the Internet needs is someone manipulating the methods that Google uses in its efforts to try and bring some order to probably the most important technological asset of this period in history.
How not to get Authority and Backlinks
In the same vein it’s valuable to state some underhand sources and practices of creating backlinks that Google not only dislikes but appears to be moving aggressively to ‘’categorize as illegitimate authorities. In no particular order of severity, the common offenders are:
- Paid backlinks – web pages where people buy and sell backlinks
- Comment spam – entries that contain links on web pages that are just not associated to the main content.
- Low quality and *duplicate content – ‘scraped’ or otherwise
- Fast growth – there are a large selection of ways that this is achievable, Google isn’t dumb. 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 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 shakey ground, but reputable press portals appear to get a lot of authority and I have definitely observed significant numbers of the same content over and over again on different portals with no penalties, I am still monitoring this, only as some of the results I am seeing go against the consistent behaviors I normally expect to see. More on this is in a future article….
