Oct 22 2009

Backlinks methods you should avoid

how to get more backlinks

OK, this is a big subject and I need to emphasise it’s not an exact science. But here is what I have learned in my analysis at the Backlinks clinic:

Authority – explained

The more authority your web pages have the higher you will rank on Google. Authority means that people trust you and your information. The good news is that authorities trusted by humans are also recognised as trustworthy by Google. A good illustration is the .edu and .gov suffixes. These suffixes imply they are trustworthy sources of content and it’s an established fact that as far as Google is concerned backlinks from these web addresses to your site will “pass on” authority to your site. Another great example is Wikipedia as the entries here are almost always 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 you 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 declares what is and isn’t authoritative is a guarded secret for good reason and falls in line with Google’s thinking of “Do no evil”. The last thing the Internet needs is an individual or a group manipulating the formulae that Google uses in its efforts to try and bring some order to probably the most significant technological development of this period in history.

How not to get Backlinks

In the same vein it’s worth my while stating some ‘black hat sources and practices of acquiring backlinks that Google not only disapproves of but appears to be acting to ‘’categorize as negative authorities. In no particular order of severity, the prime examples are:

  • Paid backlinks – hubs where individuals buy and sell backlinks
  • Comment spam – entries that have links on blog 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 radar, especially if it’s a brand new domain.
  • Backlinks from unscrupulous sites – these are particularly henous as you are guilty by association – need I say more.

*There is another factor where I may be on dodgy ground, but major news portals appear to get a lot of authority and I have definitely observed significant quantities of the same article over and over again on different web sites with no penalties, I am still looking at this, only as a percentage of the results I am seeing go against the consistent behaviors I normally expect to see. More on this is in a future post….

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Backlinks methods you should avoid

One Response to “Backlinks methods you should avoid”

  1. r4 ds Says:

    This is the most reliable thing of thing we’ve ever used. I would also like to say thank you to all your staff. Everything happened so fast!

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