How not to get backlinks
OK, this is a immersive concept and I need to emphasise it’s not clear cut. But here is what I know in my research at the Backlinks clinic:
Authority – simplified
The more authority your site has the better you will rank on Google. Authority means that people trust you and your content. The great news is that authorities trusted by humans are also trusted by Google. A great example is the .edu and .gov domain extensions. These domains imply they are credible sources of content and it’s an established fact that as far as Google is concerned backlinks from these domains to your site will send authority to your site. Another good example is Wikipedia as the contents here are almost always added by by tribes of humans as opposed to a single person.
So it follows that authority is very heavily influenced by the source of your backlinks and if authoritative content link to your web pages then you receive their authority and as far as Google is concerned you become more authoritative and so the trust in your web pages by Google increases.
How Google determines what is and isn’t authoritative is kept secret for good reason and falls in line with Google’s philosophy of “Do no evil”. The last thing the web needs is an individual or a group manipulating the mechanisms that Google uses 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
And on this thought it’s worth my while stating some common sources and methods 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 examples 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 copied
- Fast growth – there are a large selection of ways that this is achievable, Google isn’t stupid. Any sudden rise 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 ill reputed sites – 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 large media portals seem to get a lot of authority and I have definitely observed 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 go against the consistent behaviors I usually expect to see. More on this is in a future article….
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