When you read advice about where to get links from you'll likely come across someone recommending getting links from authority sites. Usually there's not a lot of definition associated with what constitutes authority.
Michael Gray wrote a post today talking about
authority and PR and mentioned how id you ask an
SEO what they want in a link you might get a response such as"
Quote:
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"A keyword rich link from a well linked/important/popular page on a trusted and authoritative website, that is preferably topically relevant to your site"
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It's funny to me, since I think I've offered that same advice a time or two myself.
Keyword rich and topicially relevant shouldn't be too hard to understand, but what about authority.
It used to be that PageRank (toolbar pagerank) was a measure of authority, but Toolbar
PR has become less useful as a metric than it once had been.
Michael's suggestion is to look at a lot of different metrics (Alexa, Compete, FeedBurner, Hitwise, etc) and take what they say in total. I'll offer a little bit of country doctor common sense wisdom to the mix too.
I think often determining an authority site isn't as hard as it seems at first. Pretend there's no such thing as a search engine. Now think about your site's topic and think about the other sites in your space. If you had a question about your topic what sites would you go to for an answer? Where would you go for major news about your industry? Those sites are your authority sites. If others are also going to those sites for answers the sites are the authorities for the people in your industry. More than likely that's exactly how search engines will see it too.
If you're not sure what an authority site is from the perspective of a search engine take the search engine out of the picture. Think of what the word authority means, think about your industry, and ask yourself which sites in your industry match your definition of authority.
Search engines might not see it exactly the same way, but more than likely they will.