How not to get backlinks

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Thursday, October 15th, 2009 Subscribe To Our Feed

OK, this is a big concept and I need to emphasise it’s not clear cut. But here is what I know in my work at the Backlinks clinic:

Authority - simplified

The more authority your site has the higher you will rank on Google. Authority means that people trust you and your information. The great news is that authorities trusted by people are also trusted by Google. A good illustration is the .edu and .gov suffixes. These suffixes imply they are credible sources of information and it’s a proven fact that in the eyes of Google backlinks from these web addresses to your site will “pass on” authority to your web pages. Another perfect example is Wikipedia as the web pages here are almost always authored by by tribes of people as opposed to a single marketer.

So it follows that authority is significantly influenced by the source of your backlinks and if authoritative web pages link to your site then you inherit their influence and in the eyes of Google you become more authoritative and hence the trust in your site by Google goes up.

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 someone exploiting the mechanisms that Google untilzes in its efforts to try and regulate probably the most significant technological resource 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 merit, the prime offenders are:

Paid backlinks – web sites where individuals buy 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
Unnatural 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 register on Google’s monitoring systems, specifically if it’s a brand new domain.
Backlinks from unscrupulous sites – 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 properties seem to get a lot of authority and I have definitely observed significant quantities of the same content 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 go against the normal behaviors I normally expect to see. More on this is in a future post….

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