how to get more backlinks

Phew, this is a multi-faceted subject and I want to emphasise it’s not clear cut. But here is what I know in my work at the Backlinks clinic:

Authority – explained

The more authority your web pages have the higher you will rank on Google. Authority means that searchers trust you and your content. The good 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 authoratitive sources of information and it’s a proven fact that in the eyes of Google backlinks from these domains to your web pages will contribute authority to your web pages. Another shining example is Wikipedia as the web pages here are mostly authored by 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 content link to your site then you receive their apparent trust 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 confidential for good reason and falls in line with Google’s philosophy of “Do no evil”. The last thing the Internet needs is an individual or a group exploiting the mechanisms that Google employs 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 obvious sources and methods of acquiring backlinks that Google not only disapproves of but appears to be moving aggressively to ‘’categorize as illegitimate authorities. In no particular order of severity, the prime examples are:

• Paid backlinks – hubs where individuals purchase 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
• Unnatural 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 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 dodgy ground, but large media properties appear to get a lot of authority and I have definitely found significant quantities 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 usually expect to see. More on this is in a future post….

Tags: backlinks, google, Page Ranking, search engine optimisation, seo, SEO marketing