How you shouldn’t acquire backlinks

December 1st, 2009 by posting

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

Authority – basics

The more authority your site has 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 good illustration is the .edu and .gov suffixes. These suffixes imply they are authoratitive sources of content and it’s a proven fact that in the eyes of Google backlinks from these web addresses to your web pages will “pass on” authority to your web pages. Another perfect example is Wikipedia as the entries here are almost always added by by group 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 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 goes up.

How Google determines what is and isn’t authoritative is kept secret for good reason and aligns with Google’s thinking of “Do no evil”. The last thing the Internet needs is someone manipulating the methods that Google untilzes in its efforts to try and bring some order to probably the most important technological resource of our times.

Backlinking methods you should avoid

In the same vein it’s valuable to state some ‘black hat sources and methods of acquiring backlinks that Google not only disapproves of but appears to be moving aggressively to ‘’categorize as negative authorities. In no particular order of merit, the prime examples are:

Paid backlinks – web pages 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 otherwise
Rapid backlink growth – there are plenty of ways that this is achievable, Google isn’t dumb. 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 villainous sites – these are particularly nasty as you are guilty by association – need I say more.

*There is another factor where I may be on shakey ground, but large news properties seem to get a lot of authority and I have definitely seen significant numbers of the same content over and over again on different portals with no penalties, I am still looking at this, only as a portion of of the results I am seeing defy the normal behaviors I normally expect to see. More on this is in a future article….

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