Step 1.23: Backlinks
Core Concepts | Search Engines | Authority | Backlinks
Authority is almost entirely derived from backlinks pointing to your site, as such they are a hugely powerful direct algorithmic ranking factor.
Backlinks are links on a page pointing / linking to a webpage on another website and are seen as a promotion of that content by Google. There are just two broad components of a link, the ‘quality’ and the ‘quantity’… You want as many quality backlinks to your site as possible to get maximal authority.
Quantifying Authority
This generally refers to backlinks and the authority, quality and trust data that define them. There are various tools that compile backlink data and they all have their own in-house / proprietary metrics to describe them.
For example, Moz use Page Authority (PA), which is a number between 0-100 to define how much authority a page has.
You will need to use a tool like Raptor's Backlink Analysis Tool to get analyse this data, we cover this concept later in this guide.
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