Wednesday, June 27, 2007

What are authority sites?

Authority Sites Are...
Websites that a lot of other sites link to as a source of authoritative information are recognized by search engines as authority sites. They have some or most of these characteristics:
  • Content on a particular subject, for example, health, or of a particular type, such as a news site.
  • Dozens or hundreds of web pages, some of which are updated regularly.
  • Many inbound links from related sites.
  • Outgoing links to quality sites with relevant content.
  • A professional appearance.
  • An authoritative domain extension such as .gov or .edu (but authority sites can have any extension).
  • A high Google PR rank.

Getting Inbound Links from Authority Sites:
Do you want to have your website rank well in search engine results? Create good content — and get authority sites to link to it.

Search engines treat links to other sites as votes for the sites linked to. But not all links are equal. More weight is given to inbound links from sites that search engines recognize as authority sites. Such links can aid greatly in having sites rank well in search engine results.

However, acquiring those links requires more effort than simply asking the webmasters of those authority sites to link to your site. If a site is seen as an authority site, everyone wants links from them.

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