When wanting to rank your website well in the search engines, it all comes down to authority.

But what does this mean?

The level of authority essentially means how highly a website is regarded by Google, and this partly dictates how well it ranks. Have you ever wondered why websites like the BBC or other large organisations do so well in Google? They have achieved their status over time by producing content that thousands of other sources have referenced. This is the essence of authority - if thousands of people link back to you, Google establishes you as a figure that people are probably looking for.

I have a great example of this that I collected recently.

Last month an unfortunate weatherman was caught “flipping the bird” on a live news broadcast. This story was reported on the Guardian’s website here: BBC weatherman’s one-finger handover.

Now in this article there is a link to a website on how to give the finger which you can see from the link “flipping the bird”.

When the article was published I immediately decided to screen grab this page’s Linkscape assessment. Linkscape compiles a number of metrics for any given web page and returns an estimate of how well a page may rank based on it’s authority. These are the results for the page in question before the Guardian article had chance to pass it’s value:

You can see that the page authority was 35/100

A week or so later once the Guardian article had chance to influence this page we can see the results have changed:

Now the page authority is 49/100. The overall domain authority has also risen to 51/100.

What has happened here? In short, because this website is being linked to from the Guardian (a trusted and authoratitive resource), it too has been given extra authority.

These results are not necessarily attributed solely to the mention on the Guardian website, but it’s a very likely possibility. This highlights the importance of website authority and it shows that links from strong websites can do your own website a lot of good indeed.